A year of living Kilmerly

The one year anniversary of The Kilmer Project has snuck up on me. What a year it was. To think just a year ago, almost to the day, I was sitting down to Top Secret. Wow.

A lot has happened in that time. Not least of all, I moved from Washington, DC to Los Angeles, CA. While I'm not done with The Kilmer Project yet (and believe me, as I've been sitting through the different versions of Alexander for a massive upcoming post, there have been several points where I've come close to quitting). I have some big news for all you Kilmer-Project-aholics out there (and thanks to the tracker I turned on with Google, I know there are at least a couple of you out there). I've decided to transfer the blog to Tumblr. I'm a little sick of the blogspot layout (soooo 2004) and like Tumblr much more.

It's not that big of a change, the link is:

http://thekilmerproject.tumblr.com

Over the next few days I'll be migrating over all the old posts and then, hopefully with a nice stiff drink in hand, I'll sit down to describe my viewing of Alexander (theatrical, director, and "final" cuts!). As well as Mindhunters which is just super weird. Please stay with us.

Stateside (2004)

This movie apparently tells a close to true life love story of a young starlet who goes crazy and a silver spoon-bred elitist who ends up having to enlist in the Marines after a drunk driving stunt goes horribly wrong. Val Kilmer plays the tough as nails drill sergeant who, much like the drill sergeants on daytime talk shows, grinds the arrogant young protagonist into something resembling an upstanding young gentleman soldier.

Rachel Leigh Cook plays the schizophrenic pop star that the spoiled teenage marine falls for. She was of course the lead in the formative (at least for me) teen movie "She's All That." It's probably in large measure due to that movie that I still carry quite the candle for her. She's looking great in Stateside, but seems (apparently to some degree by choice) to not have had many big star turns since her breakout role some time ago... interesting.

According to IMDB: "Val Kilmer originally only had a cameo, but his part as a Marine Corps Drill Instructor was extended significantly by Reverge Anselmo after filming had began."

Forgetting for a moment how silly of a name Reverge seems to be (almost like a mix between reverb and revenge), his part STILL isn't very long at all. His last scene takes place when the spoiled kid turned marine is about to graduate boot camp. Staff Sergeant Skeer (Kilmer) gives a rambling speech in which he more or less says that he doesn't have any idea how this world truly works, but that by some stroke of fate he ended married to a Polish girl he met off of base somewhere and now he has to go shopping for a stroller. That's what they're fighting for. Amen.

Spartan (2004)

First, let's take a moment to commemorate 20 years of Kilmer in cinema. He's come a long way and he's still going... somewhere.

Spartan is a return to Kilmer-as-hero form. He plays something of a Secret Service contractor. That is to say that he trains the Secret Service on some really intense ways to track down fugitives and protect America's geopolitical interests. The movie opens with him training a new class of agents out in the boonies. But get this, Kilmer's character is so above the fray (and apparently with such an ironclad security clearance) that he only moonlights as the rawest special agent in the entire world. Most of the time he's a down to earth farmer. Our heroic man of the soil returns to his farm after completing a training course only to be immediately called back to Washington by the Secret Service on an incredibly important mission: the daughter of the unnamed President of the United States has been kidnapped because the (one?) agent in her detail ran off to meet some girl instead of protecting her like he was supposed to. Once Kilmer aggressively coerces this confession out of him, the disgraced agent appropriately commits suicide.

Now Kilmer is called into action to track down the President's daughter before it gets released to the news media which would obviously be a pretty big blow to all parties involved. So after some crafty detective work, Kilmer and his cagey partner find out that she's been drugged and abducted by international sex traffickers. At this point the plot of the movie converges almost identically with "Taken," the Liam Neesen movie where he karate chops his way through Europe to save his daughter from sex traffickers. Kilmer and his partner begin a daring chase after the girl, only to find themselves constantly one step behind. Then a plot twist that would derail a lesser movie emerges: the girl's body has been discovered drowned off the coast of the Atlantic.

So that's it right? Wrong. Turns out it wasn't the girl at all. Turns out the President never loved his daughter and would rather have her considered dead than face the scandal of her security detail being reorganized to cover his laison with another woman while he was in town (which subsequently led to her - somehow accidental - kidnapping by sex traffickers. Well this is way too much for Val Kilmer to stand. He decides to track her down and rescue her no matter what the consequences. He's just that kind of guy. Also, the head of the secret service has somehow raised the girl. I don't know how the head of a nonpolitical security organization would have had any role in some politician's family life for the previous 20 years, but she made quite the emotional plea.

Kilmer goes to Europe, because he's got one hell of a moral compass. In his pursuit of this girl, I should add, at least three intelligence operatives that he talks into working with him on this off the books mission end up dead. He'd be in such deep shit in the actual bureaucratic world that it's mind boggling. Still, he manages to save this girl (played by the lovely Kristen Bell in a rare miss of a performance), he gets riddled with bullets and survives, and he kills William H. Macy's darkly evil political operative character. Basically it's a prequel to "Taken." For my money, I'd rather have the karate chopping:

Blind Horizon (2003)

Whatever happened to Neve Campbell? She had Scream, Wild Things, Party of Five, and then she totally fell off the radar. She's still made some movies but what a fall from grace. To wit, she's the femme fatale of this late period Kilmer noir movie.

Kilmer is found shot in the head in the southwest American desert. He awakes in a hospital in a small town with a severe case of amnesia. As he regains his strength he starts to have flashes of a plot to kill the President of the United States. Given the extent of his amnesia, he's not exactly fully stocked on the details so he's having a hard time convincing anyone about what exactly is going to happen. He's pretty troubled about it. Just look at him:The Secret Service is called in but they're far from convinced that he's believable considering that the President is not even planning on passing through the tiny Southwest town and Kilmer can't even remember that his name is Frank Kavanaugh. Neve Campbell shows up and claims to be his wife but there's something really off about their interactions. Kilmer starts flirting really aggressively with his nurse (Amy Smart) who looks just super foxy in this movie.

Kilmer starts going out drinking really hard. This sort of heightens the recurrence of his flashbacks.

Spoiler alert: There's a couple of shady co-conspirators in the town who pull off this massive diversion that ends up bringing the POTUS motorcade through the small town. Kilmer pulls off a massive turnaround on the co-conspirators. He gets the money he was going to be paid to be the triggerman, and kills off the would-be assassins. Hooray, but pretty forgettable.

The Missing (2003)

This movie is set in the old timey US frontier. Cate Blanchett plays a single mother homesteader who has a sort of flirtatious working relationship with Aaron Eckhart. Out of nowhere her estranged father who had run off to live with some manner of Pueblo Native American tribe shows up and is all like, "Hey, long time no see, I'm mystically aware of the natural world now and would like to reconnect with you and my grandkids." Cate Blanchett's pissed. She tells him to bounce and like a sad ol' dispossessed Native American, down the trail he goes.

Then, out of nowhere, her girls get snatched up by an Apache gang that's going to sell them to the owner of a Mexican whorehouse across the border. They kill Aaron Eckhart and Cate Blanchett is forced to call on crafty ol' Tommy Lee Jones to hunt them down and get them back.

Val Kilmer shows up only briefly as a semi corrupt US Cavalry officer who is ineffectively chasing down the Apaches. Apparently he agreed to appear in it as part of his role on the New Mexico Film Board, which tries to get movies to film in New Mexico (seriously).

This movie features one Batman (VK) and two Twofaces (Eckhart and T.L.Jones) but no x-men. I kind of love Tommy Lee Jones.

Wonderland (2003)

Pardon the delay faithful readers, but I have returned to my Kilmer viewings and will continue to update the remaining entries in the Kilmer filmography with all due haste. I have a couple on the backlog that I need to get up right away so without further ado let me begin by asking:

How excited are you about the prospect of Val Kilmer playing a porn star? You'd imagine he'd bring that same raw-Jim Morrison in the Doors-sexual energy to the role, right? Now, how about Val Kilmer playing a washed up porn star who's now really into drugs and may be at the center of a grizzly murder? Sounds great right? It is.

Wonderland tells the story of a grizzly quadruple murder that took place in Laurel Canyon, a neighborhood type district in the greater metropolitan Los Angeles area (my new home). Back in 1981 this murder went down and a lot of evidence suggested that former porn star John Holmes was involved.
Good god. Look at that man. It's almost enough to make me grow out a mustache... almost. When the well endowed subject of Wonderland was actually making his films, the legal status of pornography was kind of unclear and accordingly, Mr. Holmes did what any rational porn star and drug addict would do to avoid getting in trouble: he became a police informant for the LAPD.

The movie focuses on a couple of eventful weeks when John Holmes ripped off some drug dealers living on the eponymous Wonderland Drive in Laurel Canyon. Kilmer plays Holmes as a totally sleazy and desperate cokehead and liar who betrays absolutely everyone at some point in the course of events. The murders and the subsequent investigation is told in a kind of interesting noir-ish nonlinear manner. It's a pretty enjoyable crime drama and Val Kilmer plays a man in a deep professional downward spiral (meta!).

Masked and Anonymous (2003)

Full disclosure: I'm a Bob Dylan fan. I don't just mean I appreciate his 1960s topical folk songs. I like his recent stuff a great deal. Everything from Time Out of Mind onward anyway. I like his life story and the bizarre turns his career has taken over the years. I've read his memoirs. His songwriting is usually phenomenal and his artistic vision is generally unique and forward-looking. Still, everybody makes mistakes.

"Masked and Anonymous" is set in a dystopian future where a corrupt concert promoter (John Goodman) has decided to put on a benefit concert of sorts to, somehow, heal the nation's psyche. Due to John Goodman's corruption, the only artist that they talk into playing is Jack Fate (Bob Dylan) a late Bob Dylanesque figure whose fortunes are in serious decline as he has to be sprung from jail to play the concert. The main problem with the movie is that the pacing is so slow that the story, told in this paragraph, drags out over the course of a full length movie. There are a couple of performances mixed in. It kind of makes the whole thing seem like a long, strange, conceptual Bob Dylan music video.

Val Kilmer appears only briefly in the film. He's listed as an "animal handler" in the credits, but he actually plays more of an exotic animal bbq concessions stand attendant who delivers a long rambling speech that more or less sums up everything wrong with this movie. Take a look.

Run for the Money (2002) aka Hard Cash

Val Kilmer plays a corrupt FBI agent in this slapdash Christian Slater-led crime caper. The plot is pretty outlandish. Christian Slater's character is a member of a gang of thieves who ends up taking the fall for a robbery gone bad. When he gets out of jail, he goes home to his love interest's trailer. She's been raising his daughter while he's in the slammer. While he promises his lil' sweet pea that he's going to lead an honest life from now on, the love interest is pressing him to make a couple big robberies so they can run away somewhere and start fresh. Side note, isn't it striking how many crime movies involve characters planning to run away somewhere and live fabulously wealthy new lives?

So things are going good for Christian Slater until he crosses Val Kilmer (and his partner)! As a psychotic and corrupt FBI agent, who is apparently not answerable to any sort of direct supervisor, Kilmer had been plotting out robbing the same off track betting parlor that Slater's gang takes out. It leads to a bunch of "haven't we seen this before" sort of action movie gimmicks with the corrupt cops kidnapping the daughter, a bunch of people dying, and a boat blowing up.

The strangest thing about this movie is that it seems to have mostly been meant for international markets. There's about three different working titles for it and a bunch of information about the international release dates on the imdb page.

The Salton Sea (2002)

Val Kilmer seems to have taken about a year and a half off of movie making. Presumably, he spent that time traveling back from Mars. In his next feature, a skillfully presented film noir, he plays a mohawked speed freak named Danny Boyle. I'm not going to do a spoiler alert for this movie because it's actually really good and I would recommend seeing it. Suffice to say that Kilmer's character wasn't born looking like this:
He had an awful experience on a trip with his young wife to the Salton Sea. See, he used to be a jazz musician. A whiteboy trumpet player of some talent. Then fate handed him a shitty hand and he's been sulking about it and taking a bunch of meth ever since. He's also narcing on dealers to a couple of rough cops. Looks like he's in a pretty bad downward spiral of self destruction... or is he? This movie does a pretty a good job of handling some modern takes of the film noir style. Yes it opens near what you will eventually see to be just about the end, but he's more of the detective as a drug addict than the detectives he's working with. It's a good turn in what has otherwise been a string of missed chances for our boy Val.

Red Planet (2000)

Here's the thing about "Red Planet:" once you get over the fact that it's an impossibly absurd and insane premise, even by sci-fi standards, it's not that bad of a movie. Like all good sci-fi, the lesson is not really about the future, it's about the present. Specifically, it's a pleas for environmental sustainability. In "Red Planet," the Earth of the future has been overpopulated and polluted to the point that the human race is in danger of wiping itself out. So, since the entire world had known about this for quite a while but never bothered to actually institute any social policies that could save the planet, it was decided by the world's governments (ha! the UN?) to start blasting big clumps of algae at Mars in the hopes that it would turn into an atmosphere capable of supporting life. The small cast of "Red Planet" is some specialty crew sent on a mission to make sure everything's in good blooming order up there.

There are eight crew members, led by the hardass captain, Trinity err... Carrie Ann Moss? Our hero, Val Kilmer, plays Gallagher, not the one you're thinking of though:He's basically the ship's mechanic. Like all strong women commanding officers in sci-fi, Carrie Ann Moss sleeps with Kilmer's character with little prompting. When an inconvenient solar flare fucks up the mothership, everybody but Trinity bails in their little launch ship to go down to the hopefully now partially habitable Mars surface. Trinity manages not to die, but just about everyone else will (spoiler alert). So the old philosopher with no real purpose on the space mission gets fucked up in the landing and croaks soon after. Everyone else is freaking out because they've got to get to this distant base but they're running out of air. Also, all that algae that was supposed to be making a new atmosphere is missing. Stuck on Mars with little hope of breathing for long. That's trouble. For some unexplained reason, two of the crew members hate each other and one of them pushes the other, I forget which, off a cliff. Now they get to the base, but whaaaa? It's all shredded. Like some big paranormal event came through and ripped it pieces. All the air's gone. All the food's gone. They're in some deep shit. Their air is no critically low and they start suffocating in their suits. Then, in the biggest leap of plot I've seen in a long time, Kilmer takes his mask off and he can breathe despite the lack of algae or other materials that might give them air.

Okay, stop to consider that. They can breathe but it's still a lifeless 'red planet.' So now they've got to figure out how to get back. They decide that they're going to use this old soviet rocket that's stuck there a couple miles away. They start making their way there and almost freeze to death at night. Some big storm rolls through. Also, Kilmer's pet robot goes berserk and is skillfully hunting and trying to kill them. It gets the bad guy. Ugh... There's so much to tell!

So we're down to two of the astronauts trying to get to the cosmonautical rocket. Kilmer and fate's enemy Tom Sizemore, when all of a sudden, we see the algae (hooray!) being devoured by a swarm of space roaches that obviously at their base and end up eating Tom Sizemore (booo!). This is a strange interpretation of Martians. They're like bugs that apparently love to eat everything that's not the inorganic surface of Mars. But they're flammable. Oh, and they somehow excrete oxygen which is why the cast can breathe without space suits. There's a showdown between the robot, Kilmer and the bugs. Kilmer blasts off. Earth is far from saved.

This actually was not that good of a movie now that I've written this all out.

Pollock (2000)

This well received biopic is about the famous 20th century American painter, Jackson Pollock. This being the internet and all, I'm not too sure how familiar you may be with famous modern painters, so for the uninitiated, Jackson Pollock caused quite a stir by making a lot of nice new modern art that consisted of dripping paint onto the canvas.He made a lot of them and for a time they were really popular. Then they were not that popular anymore because the art world is full of fickle pretentious assholes who always turn on a scene if it starts to get too cool, accessible, or successful for them. Anyway, Jackson Pollock drank himself right into a fatal car crash. Vrooooooooooom! Kilmer reprises his masterful Dutch accent that he picked up in "The Saint" to briefly appear onscreen as Willem de Kooning, another popular post-war abstract artist. De Kooning is known mostly for his weird depictions of women:
Oh yeah, he was pretty out there:
Kilmer's in this movie for like two minutes. Moving on.

Joe the King (1999)

I had never heard of this movie until I started The Kilmer Project. It was my hope that it would be a period piece about King Joseph I of Portugal, but alas, it is not. I'm still waiting, Hollywood! No, this is a story about a poor family in what, I'm judging from the accents, is supposed to be Long Island. The Joe they're talking about would be Val Kilmer's troubled and troublesome son. Kilmer plays Joe's hard drinking, deep in debt to fucking everyone, abusive janitor of a dad. The story is really about Joe and how a series of little crimes, like stealing food, spiral completely out of hand until this little preteen is pulling major heists.

He gets busted by Ethan Hawke, his guidance councelor who definitely did not deserve prominent billing in the credits since he had like two minutes of screentime. This extended trailer is a pretty complete retelling of the whole movie:



Anyway, the main thing to take away from this is that Val Kilmer gained a bunch of weight to play this role which was probably a mistake because even though he performs admirably in a difficult role, all that weight went to his gut and I don't think he's ever gotten rid of it.

At First Sight (1999)

Our hero finds himself walking the chick flick route in this absurdly premised piece of late 90s nonsense that's apparently based on a true story. Kilmer's character is just like every other adorable, softspoken, hockey playing, blind professional masseuse in a small upstate New York spa town, named Virgil. He smiles awkwardly throughout the whole movie. The story begins when he meets a nice new girl, who is a fancy uptight city dweller played by Mira Sorvino. She goes to the spa out in the country to take a break from her high pressure career as an architect or something. She gets a little crush on the massuese only to realize halfway through a conversation "Oh fuck! He's blind!" Kilmer's smiley Virgil goes home and brags to his seeing eye dog about the new girl he met (really). Very presumptuous on his part, but he's not wrong, she comes back to pursue this gentle, smiley fellow in earnest.

The course of the romance in "At First Sight" seems puritanically slow moving. They kiss and fool around a bit and she's inviting him to move in with her in the city. Then she discovers an ad for an optomologist who swears he can restore Virgil's shattered vision. Virgil throws a goddman passive aggressive hissy fit at this. His creepily overprotective sister let's Mira Sorvino know that he's gone through a bunch of procedures back in the day that all hurt really bad. Doctor Nathan Lane gets all lasik on his peepers and before you know it, he's restored. But he doesn't know what seeing is all about so he loses his shit! He starts freaking out bigtime and it's way overdramatically executed.

Oh, so the love interest's architecture firm consists of Kilmer's girl and her ex-husband. So, that's not awkward at all. Kilmer has a really hard time adjusting to the whole 'sighted culture' stuff but eventually he starts getting the hang of it. Mira Sorvino doesn't like him so much now that he's basically just another dude without a disability to make him seem idioscyncratic and exotic. Plus she gets really impatient with teaching him a bunch of seemingly obvious things that would be really hard for someone who had never seen anything before to comprehend. She's kind of a bitch. She starts straying and has a totally weird kiss with her ex. Tisk tisk.

So it's kind of a mixed bag for ol' Virgil. Sure he can see, but all he's really seeing is his relationship fall apart. Then things take a turn for the worse. In a twist right out of Flowers for Algernon, his vision starts to fall apart. (Spoiler alert): Pretty soon he's back to being really blind but still living in New York and helping out other blind folk. Eventually Mira Sorvino decides she loves him and wants to be with him again since he's back to being blind and exotic. She's presumably no less of a bitch but he agrees. True love conquers all.

Prince of Egypt (1998)

Val Kilmer plays a cartoon Moses. Yes, Moses. Also, God. There is of course a part in the biblical story of the Exodus where God talks to Moses. This is Kilmer talking to himself. The movie has a totally star studded cast for no good reason. Sandra Bullock? Really? For brevity's sake and to keep the blog moving I'm totally skimping on this entry. Whatever.

The Saint (1997)

Sorry for the delays in updating. Blogging is hard. To get pack on track I'm going to give some abbreviated posts for the past couple flicks.

The Saint is the story of an orphan kid who grew up in a really rough orphanage. The strict ass nuns force them to take the names of Catholic saints, so our future hero gets named Simon. His first girlfriend accidentally gets tossed off a balcony to her death while he was showing off his lockpicking skills. This obviously sours his experiences with Catholocism and maybe even morality when he grows up and turns into Val Kilmer. Dude turns criminal. Straight up master theft criminal. Straight up master of disguise criminal. Straight up vocal stylist criminal. You get the idea.

The story has quickly jumped to his adult years where he's ripping off the Russian mob. Read that sentence again. Yes, he's trying to be a cat-burglar to the most dangerous criminal organization around. Smart. So master thief Simon Templar (as in the Teutonic order!) blows this robbery.

There's a high stakes target he needs to rob from that the Russians are also after. It's Elizabeth Shue. She's developed cold fusion and apparently it's quite lucrative. She's got the formula written on notes that she keeps in her bra. Our hero, of course, gets her out of that with a bad costume as a professor of some sort that reminds her of her ex. Unfortunately, our professional thief makes the predictable mistake of falling in love with her.

Kilmer is downright terrible with some of these accents. I can't understand why they wouldn't spend a little extra on a decent speech coach.

The Russians are after them, they're in love, he's a master of disguise and a hugely successful con artist. This is how my parents met too. They get away, happy ever after the end. Boom!

Alright, blog. Just a couple more to go until I'm caught up!

The Ghost and the Darkness (1996)

Hey do you remember that one Val Kilmer movie... with the lions... in Africa? Yes. Yes I do.

The rambling thriller/period drama/horror/true story(?)/white-man's-burden colonial tale is set in Tsavo, Uganda during the height of the British Empire. Val Kilmer plays John Henry Patterson, a colonel in Imperial Britain's version of the Army Corp of Engineers. He's sent by an inexplicably mean boss to Uganda to oversee the construction of a railroad bridge. Once there, he finds out that the local (or imported from India) construction crews working on the bridge are totally freaked out about some lion attacks that have snatching people up in the night. He immediately kills a lion. Just, blap, one shot, down. I worried for a moment that I had completely misjudged what this movie was about and was going to have to settle in for a long construction journal.

But no. There's more than one lion terrorising this labor camp. In fact, there's two more. The Ghost and The Darkness. That's what the laborers are calling them. Anyway, these lions just start cold killing anything that looks like a man in the middle of the night. They sneak up when people are sleeping and drag them screaming off into the shrubbery to kill them for no purpose other than to momentarily satiate the lions' endless bloodlust. The workers are pissed and blame this ill fortune on the white demon that recently showed up named Val Kilmer. No matter what he tries, these lions just keep boldly attacking the workers. Daylight, nightime, sunshine, rain, snow (er... not so much snow, it being Africa and all). These lion attacks just get absurdly brazen though. I mean I know their lions but come on humans! Strength in numbers!


Then out of nowhere Michael Douglass roles through with a pack of Masaii warriors looking like he would never somehow convince Catherine Zeta Jones to get with him. He plays Remington, a former Confederate soldier who has a southern accent for about 10% of his lines (which is still somehow a better showing than whatever the fuck Kilmer was going for with his Anglo-Irish character's accent!). Anyway, the two white guys try to save the day by heroically hunting down these man killing beasts which cleverly outsmart their bullets until the war of attrition is finally one by our heroic Kilmer. Triumphing over nature by building the bridge over a river and triumphing over nature by putting bullets into a bunch of lions, the world is man's now.

The story is based on a true (though likely highly embellished) story and the real lions were donated to the Chicago Field museum in the 1930s. But um... Michael Douglass's weird ass character is totally invented just so things don't go too "Heart of Darkness." This movie is definitely worth watching if only for this one weird dream Kilmer has where his wife and baby son are singled out and attacked by a lion in a crowd of people.

Dead Girl* (1996) note

According to Kilmer's IMDB page, he played a supporting role in a 1996 movie called "Dead Girl" which was not released in the US and accordingly is not reviewed on this site. I'm trying to be thorough with this but I'm not going to kill myself trying to hunt down this comedy (apparently it's a comedy).

The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996)

Based on an H.G. Wells story, "The Island of Dr. Moreau" is generally not remembered fondly. In fact, my Netflix account thought that a viewer like me would give it a damning 1.7 star (out of 5.0) review. In truth, I enjoyed the movie immensely. It's dark and admiittedly kind of ridiculous, but it approaches some really interesting themes regarding bio-ethics and human nature.

The story begins with David Thewlis's (who is in Harry Potter but is not Snape!) character stranded in the ocean after having killed his two fellow survivors in a desperate act of self preservation. His raft is rescued by an Indonesian ship aboard which, for unknown reasons, Val Kilmer's character Montgomery is traveling. Kilmer persuades Thewlis to come visit the island where he works. Dr. Moreau (Marlon Brando at the height of his meltdown - overweight, barely audible, and strange strange strange) is the mad scientist who owns the island. It takes Thewlis's character all of one night to find out that there's really fucked up tests being performed which mix animal and human DNA with grotesque results. All manner of deformed freaky animal-human hybrids, or manimals if you will, are living a primative but separate life on the island... and strangely vegetarian? Some of these manimals are Brando's own "children" including the especially human looking Fairuza Balk (of American History X and Waterboy fame). Thewlis for some reason wants to run afoul of God's design by having some weird feelings of attraction for this feline human cross breed. The island's manimal population is kept in check by a high pitched buzzer that Brando's character has implanted in all of the manimals. For better or worse, "The Island of Dr. Moreau" gave the world the inspiration for the Austin Powers character mini-me by featuring a piano playing tiny version of Marlon Brando played by this guy:


Things quickly melt down when one of the manimals rips out his implant. There's kind of a manimal revolution and almost everyone dies. The end. Oh yeah, Val Kilmer says "when I die I want to go to dog heaven" and he does an actually pretty decent Marlon Brando impression which seems like a bit of overkill even a movie as over the top as this one.

If nothing else, "The Island of Dr. Moreau" served as a one-two punch with "Batman Forever" to knock Val Kilmer right out of Hollywood super-stardom. Although Kilmer has a huge filmography extending well beyond Dr. Moreau, he has never managed to regain the same starpower that he possessed in the mid 1990s. These two critical failures in a row coincided with Kilmer's divorce from Joanne Whaley (which he learned of from a news broadcast during the filming of Dr. Moreau!).

Heat (1995)

Michael Mann's 1995 cop and robber drama "Heat" tells the heartwarming story of a group of friends who had a dream. That dream was to pull off massive robberies.



I've always been kind of partial to Michael Mann's crime stories. Consider some of these titles: "Miami Vice," "The Insider," "Collateral," and upcoming John Dillinger movie "Public Enemies." He certainly tells a good cop and robber story where both the traditional good guy and bad guy characters are presented as being ethically compromised. "Heat" was the movie that really launched his career and that concept is definitely at play here.



One of the most exciting aspects of "Heat" was that for the first time ever, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino would be sharing the screen in the same movie. Granted, De Niro and Al Pacino were both in Godfather II, but because of the different stories being told set in different times they never were on screen at the same time. Also, don't make the common mistake of thinking that they were both in "Goodfellas," because that of course, is Joe Pesci, not Al Pacino that plays the loose cannon sidekick. So for the first time sharing a screen together are two Hollywood megastars made famous for their roles as gangsters. Take a look at the poster, you know there's going to be some high pressure acting going on between them right?:

Well... un pocito. Since Al Pacino plays a cop and Robert De Niro plays a bank robber, they only cross paths in two scenes. Even more frustrating for the viewer who is consciously aware of how exciting it is to have these two in the same movie, the director seems to have made a concerted effort to not have both of their faces in the same shot at any point during the movie. This leads to a disproportionate use of over the shoulder shots during the few scenes that their characters share. The scene in a diner is pretty cool though.

Val Kilmer plays De Niro's sidekick, a character named Chris Shiherlis. He's a family man with an unseemly long blond ponytail. He's also got some intense gambling debts which kind of force his hand into taking part in some increasingly brazen bank robberies even though the wifey is clearly sick of this life and trying to leave him. Even though he's one of four characters in the sort of inner circle of criminals, you can easily tell the De Niro likes him better than Tom Sizemore or that terrifying Mexican guy (whose so scary that the character is named after the actor!).

Batman Forever (1995)

Where to begin... If your average man on the street were asked to name one movie starring Val Kilmer, they would almost all say Batman Forever. He is universally remembered for his leading role as Batman. It is likely to be listed someday in his obiturary. Unfortunately, it is one of the absolute worst movies made in the 1990s.

I'm a little worried about how to approach this post because it's hard to explain the many places where this movie went wrong. There's no fatal coup d'grace here - this is a movie that dies a slow death from a thousand little cuts. I would like to think that Kilmer was unaware of the shitshow in which he was participating. I'd like to think that he was a serious actor who tried to bring a unique voice to a brooding and complex character. As anyone whose seen "The Dark Knight" can attest, when properly executed, Batman can be one of the most engaging characters of the superhero universe. According to no higher source than Kilmer's IMDB trivia page, he had a terrible working relationship with Joel Schumaker but enjoyed playing Batman. I think the conventional wisdom has it that Joel Schumaker is the man responsible for this godawful mess of a movie. He was given a chance for vindication but somehow made an even worse follow up with 1997's Batman and Robin. His IMDB page reads as a sad list of regretted wastes of time and uninviting avoidable flops. The end result of Batman Forever is a series of poorly thought out characters that don't really connect with each other and a story that just has so many weird implausible and obvious ommissions of rational thought that it's more puzzling than any of Jim Carrey's riddles.

I'll give you an example. Bruce Wayne is touring his factory when he spies the Bat-signal on the night sky (the lighting and full staff would suggest it's daytime). He quickly takes his leave of the factory tour (which, we're given the impression that he almost never visits this facility at all) and goes to his office which is apparently in this same unfrequented building. He goes to his desk and presses a button and a hole in the floor opens up that feeds him (in a sort of casket) through a tunnel at speeds of 200 miles per hour down to the batcave. Now, leave aside for a moment the fact that someone other than Bruce Wayne or Alfred would have to have built high speed slide by covertly creating a pipe that travels to the rurual Wayne Manor. Wouldn't the cleaning staff notice a big fucking trap door under this guy's desk?

Nicole Kidman plays a forensic psychologist who, when she's not busy acting totally slutty to both Bruce Wayne and Batman, offers inaccurate psychological insights into the mind of Two Face. Thankfully, I screened this film with a Psychology PhD candidate who was able to point out Kidman's many errors. For example, Kidman quite quickly diagnoses Two Face as having "Obsessive Disorder with homocidal features." Now maybe it's splitting hairs to point out that this doesn't exist, but if the script for Batman Forever was anything more than Joel Schumaker scribbling notes on a bar napkin, they could have called an actual psychologist to at least make an attempt at writing in something that's not totally made up. There's no shortage of actual psychologists in Los Angeles. Also, another unexplainable moment occurs when Bruce Wayne goes to visit her office in City Hall. He hears aggravated female grunts and hitting sounds. When he breaks down the door he finds her in the middle of a punching bag workout... in the middle of the day... in an enormous office at City Hall. What kind of psychologist is she that she has a punching bag in the middle of her office? It's not explained, it's just out there.

Perhaps the most blatant error of this movie is that with two supervillains, they decided to give them not one original voice. Instead, both Jim Carrey as The Riddler, and Tommy Lee Jones as Two Face, play cackling evil maniacs in the same way that Jack Nicholson played the Joker in the first of the modern series of Batman movies.

Compare this (about a minute and a half in):


With this:



It's a goddamn travesty. This ruined everyone who touched it for quite a while. Jim Carrey's never FULLY rebounded, Tommy Lee Jones had Men In Black but otherwise... tsk tsk, and Val Kilmer began a slow strange decent into his present trajectory. Only Michael Keaton has suffered a worse Batman curse.