Fabulous Film & Friends Gino Caputi

On our 80th episode of Fabulous Film & Friends what better way to follow up a Road House podcast than by looking at the highlights of pioneering gay director John Schlesinger? We’re talking about 1969’s Midnight Cowboy starring Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, Brenda Vaccaro, John McGiver, Sylvia Miles, Bob Balaban and Barnard Hughes as well as 1971’s Sunday, Bloody Sunday starring Peter Finch, Glenda Jackson, Murry Head and Dame Peggy Ashcroft topped off with 1975’s The Day of the Locust starring William Atherton, Donald Sutherland, Karen Black, Burgess Meredith, Bo Hopkins, Pepe Serna, Geraldine Paige, Richard Dysart, Lil’ Jackie Earl Haley, an even littler Billy Barty and Mrs. Lovey Howell, herself, Natalie Schaeffer. 
 
I’m joined this week by the reliably ab-fab crew of my kid-sister and lit major Roseanne Caputi as well as the sensitive cowhand himself, actor, photographer and snappy patter producer par excellence Gordon Alex Robertson! 
 
Okay, before we don the fringed suede jackets and find a spot on 43rd St., the synopses:
 
 In Midnight Cowboy big, dumb Texan Joe Buck quits his job as a dishwasher and hops on a Greyhound to the big town, New York City with dreams of making his fortune as a male prostitute servicing rich, bored housewives on Park Avenue. After a series of cringe-inducing misfires, Joe finds himself penniless and living in a squalid, condemned apartment with a sickly, limping con man named Enrico “Ratso” Rizzo. With Ratso serving as Joe’s manager the only place they can go is straight down. Barely surviving a New York winter, Joe’s fortunes finally start to change for the better until a dying Ratso implores Joe to get him to Florida. 
 
Sunday, Bloody Sunday slowly--ever so slowly-- catalogues the highs and lows of two middle-aged, upper-class Londoners, one man, Dr. Daniel Hirsch, a perennially single doctor and one woman, Alex Greville a divorcee who both find purpose and vitality in a love triangle with Bob Elkin, a young sculptor in his 20’s. The three must deal with abrupt change, loss and acceptance when Bob the sculptor moves to America. 
 
The Day of the Locust, based on the 1939 novel by Nathaniel West, follows the course of three, tragic dreamers who came to Hollywood with eyes toward stardom but end up victims of its cold-hearted excess: Tod Hacket, a somewhat idealistic --if a bit rapey set designer from Yale-- who is in love with Fay Greener, a beautiful but talentless day playing actress who refuses to date men that aren’t wealthy, and none other than Homer Simpson, a simple, religious and socially awkward accountant who naively takes Fay in to live with him. 
 
Was Mr. Schlesinger an all time great? Or a one hit wonder? 
 
Find out! 

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This week on Fabulous Film & Friends we’re leaping head first into the bone-cracking, tooth-spitting, throat-ripping and monster-trucking action of the Road House movies! Both of them! That’s the original 1989 version directed by Rowdy Herrington and starring Patrick Swayze, Sam Elliot, Kelly Lynch, Ben Gazzara, Kevin Tighe, Marshall Teague, Julie Michaels, Red West, Kathleen Wilhoite and blink and you’ll miss him, Keith David. 
 
As compared to the 2024 remake directed by Doug Liman and starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Conor McGregor, Daniela Melchior, Billy Magnussen, Jessica Williams, Post Malone, Arturo Castro & Joaquim de Almeida.
 
My tougher n’ leather crew today is made up of Roseanne Caputi, George Young, David Johnson DMD and although we had to beg him back, the bruiser himself, Gordon Alex Robertson!
Before we bite into all that throat-ripping goodness, the synopses:
 
Road House ‘89  is an epic tale of real estate fraud, malfeasance, racketeering and monster truck mayhem when zen, philosophizing Big City club bouncer Dalton is hired by Missouri bar owner Frank Tilgheman to clean up his honky tonk club The Double Deuce. Getting top dollar of 5k a week, Dalton packs up and moves to the town of Jasper to get things moving. After beating up a few goons and cutting the pork out of the Double D, Dalton runs afoul of a local business tycoon, the most Italian looking Brad Wesley you’ve ever seen. Wesley wants the Double Deuce for his own purposes and he also wants Dalton’s new girlfriend, the beautiful and brainy Dr. Elizabeth “Doc” Clay as his own. So Wesley’s plan: KILL DALTON! Dalton enlists the aid of his friend and mentor Wade Garrett to help in the ensuing ruckus, but Garrett’s skills are no match for Wesley’s evil. Wesley kills Wade in doing so unleashes the raging raw brute force of a one man army that is…DALTON!
 
Road House 24’ basically follows the same plot as the original except it moves the locale to Florida and makes Dalton an ex-MMA star and gives him the first name Elwood. And speed boats take the place of Monster Trucks. And that’s about it. 
 
 Who wins the smackdown? Find out!

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This week on Fabulous Film and Friends we’re covering a trio of Neo Noir films set in the city of…where else? Los Angeles, as we discuss 1998’s The Big Lewbowski, directed by Joel and Ethan Coen and starring the extraordinary Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Julianne Moore, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, David Huddleston, John Tutturo, Ben Gazara, David Thewlis, Tara Reid, Peter Stormare, Leon Russom and Sam Elliot against 2014’s Inherent Vice directed by Paul Thomas Anderson starring Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, Owen Wilson, Katherine Waterston, Benicio Del Toro, Reese Witherspoon, Martin Short, Jena Malone, Maya Rudolph Martin Donovan and Hong Chau, topped off with 2018’s Under the Silver Lake  directed by 
David Robert Mitchell  and  starring Andrew Garfield, Riley Keough, Topher Grace, Grace Van Patten,  Riki Lindhome, Wendy vanden Heuvel, Callie Hernandez, Jimmi Simpson, Zosia Mamet, Jeremy Bob, Rex Lynn, Patrick Fischler and Sydney Sweeney.
 
My guests today are Roseanne Caputi and back by popular demand, Gordon Alex Robertson!
Before contemplating the endless currents of depth and consciousness, man, the synopses: 
 
The Big Lebowski,  follows a lot of ins-and-outs and what-have-you’s of a very complicated case when two goons working for porn king Jackie Treehorn mistakenly burst into the apartment of Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski  demanding money that his supposed wife Bunny owes Jackie.  Realizing their mistake but still adding the flourish of urinating on the Dude’s favorite rug, the pair leaves and gets the hang loose and tolerant Dude’s dander up.  Dude the sets off finding the wealthy Jeffrey Lebowski that the pair were looking for and asks him for compensation for his soiled rug. The Big Lebowski flat out refuses the request, calls the Dude a bum, and kicks him out of his house. Surprisingly, a few days later The Big Lebowski summons The Dude to his mansion and asks him to act as a courier to a group of nihilists who have abducted his wife Bunny and are demanding a million dollars in ransom. With his reactionary ‘Nam vet bowling buddy Walter Sobchak at his side, the Dude enters a web of deception, greed and pain as he tries to make sense of the convoluted and problematical condition that he finds himself in. 
 
Inherent Vice ups the ante with ex-cop and junkie P.I. Larry “Doc” Sportello who follows a trail of real estate fraud, heroin smuggling, corrupt federal agents and dentists when his ex-girlfriend Shasta Faye re-enters his life and gives him the tip that her current boyfriend, real estate tycoon Mickey Wolfman, has a wife who is trying to have him committed. With rival LA Police Lt. Detective Christian “Bigfoot” Bjornsen working alternately, with and against him, Doc plows into the labyrinthian case headfirst aided by only his wits and piles of weed and coke in the desperate quest for the truth. 
 
Under the Silver Lake follows a journey through endless hidden messages, conspiracies and millennial self-discovery as perennial slacker Sam tries to uncover the truth regarding the disappearance of his beautiful neighbor Sarah, who vanishes without a trace a day after billionaire industrialist Jefferson Sevence is killed a car crash. 


Which film best exemplifies the whole corruption, crime and conspiracies in L.A. thing? 


Find out!
 

This week on Fabulous Film and Friends the wait is over and in an exciting change of pace, no negativity. We’re going to slaver and spaz all about 2024’s Dune Part 2 directed by Denis Villanueve and starring Timotheé Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Javier Bardem, Zendaya, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgaard, Austin Butler, Florence Pugh, Dave Bautista, Charlotte Rampling, Lea Seydoux, Christopher Walken and (spoiler alert!)  Anya Taylor-Joy. 
 
My guests today are David Johnson DMD and Roseanne Caputi. Series regular and good friend Alex Robertson is sitting this one out because he said, and I quote, “I have to polish my silver and scrub the cabinets tonight.”  But the truth is Dune is sci-fi and is packed wall-to-wall with current superstars with nary an obscure 70’s grindhouse actor to be found in its nearly 3 hour running time. 
 
Before we contemplate the many  riddles of the film, the synopsis: 
 
Dune Part 2 picks up exactly where part one left off: After narrowly escaping multiple assassination attempts and exiled in the harsh desert of the savagely hot and dry spice producing planet Arrakis after Paul Atraide’s father Duke Leto was murdered by Baron Vladimir Harkonnen in an brutal attack against House Atraides conceived and orchestrated by the Emperor Shaddam IV, Paul and his mother Lady Jessica have joined with the desert warrior Freman people.  Paul wrestles with the notion or is it a plot? That he is the Kwisatz Haderach, the chosen one prophesized to lead the Freman warriors in a holy war against all of the Houses of the Galactic Empire. Fearing that their plot has backfired, the Bene Gesserit order of witches led by Gaius Helen Mohiam devise a plan to install the sadistic Feyd Rotha Harkonen as governor of Arrakis in order to quell the Freman rebellion brewing which Paul leads and Lady Jessica, now a full full-fledged Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother, promotes to the more religiously extreme Southern Freman tribes.  
 
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This week on Fabulous Film and Friends with the glow of our 75th episodeebbing, it’s time to pick up the empty champagne bottles, sweep the floor and go back to discussing one measly film, o’ but what a film it is: 2023’s Killers of the Flower Moon, directed by the legendary Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert DeNiro, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons, John Lithgow, Brendan Fraser, and a veritable host of craggy-faced old coots on the white end, and on the Native American end, a who’s who of Oklahoma and Montana actors who either got their big break from doing Community Theater or who have never acted in a major feature film before, including the Oscar nominated Lily Gladstone, who, like myself, got her start acting in Montana’s Missoula Children’s Theater. 

Who knows? It may have been my heralded performance as the Narrator in Jack in The Beanstalk or my talents at hawking sweatshirts after the big show that gave a young Lily Gladstone the acting bug. 
 
My guests this week are a full sweat lodge of opinionated tribal elders, I’m talking Roseanne Caputi, Alex Robertson and not one but  two celebrated authors returning to the program, George Young and David Johnson, DMD 
Okay before we get into all-out movie war the synopsis:
Based on true accounts of Osage Nation member who were murdered after oil was discovered on Oklahoma tribal land in the 1920’s. The tribal members had retained mineral rights on their reservation, but Bill Hale, a corrupt local, schemes with his dull-witted and greedy nephews Byron and Ernest Burkhart to steal the tribal members' wealth. 

This week on Fabulous Film and Friends we are pointing our compasses southward to the land of doom and gloom:

Australia!

Don’t be fooled by the likes of Paul Hogan, Yahoo Serious and Thor, underneath that loopy, whimsical Australian charm, lies an unparalleled grim and sober yet prophetic outlook about life on Earth as evidenced by 1971’s Walkabout directed by Nicholas Roeg, though full disclosure: he’s an Englishman who shepherded Jenny Agutter, Luc Roeg, David Gulpilil and John Meillion to cinematic prominence, then 1982’s The Road Warrior aka Mad Max 2 directed by George Miller and starring Mel Gibson, Bruce Spence, Kjell Nillson, Max Phipps, Vernon Wells, Mike Preston, Arkie Whitely, Viginia Hey and Emil Minty then topped off with The Road directed by Australian native John Hillcoat and starring Viggo Mortenson, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Charlize Theron, Garrett Dillahunt, the late Michael Kenneth Williams, Guy Pearce  and Robert Duvall. 
 My guests today are once again the series regulars who have both the stomach and gloomy disposition to take solace in rewatching these films back-to-back-to-back, Roseanne Caputi and Alex Robertson.
Okay before we go on a walkabout of our own, the synopses:
 In Walkabout, a perfectly ordinary pair of upper-class English siblings get lost in the Australian outback after their father takes them for a picnic then tries to murder them. They look to be perfect candidates for either heat stroke and/or vulture food until they are rescued by a young Aboriginal teen out on his Walkabout. 
 
The Road Warrior/Mad Max 2  raises the stakes of the original Mad Max and picks up the story with ex cop Max Rockatansky travelling the barren, hellish, post-apocalyptic highways and stumbling upon an evil road gang led by a brute named Lord Humungus. Humungus is hellbent on invading a compound belonging to a group of  civilized and intelligent settlers who have built an oasis around the last of the oil wells and have running lights and supplies. Losing numbers and their morale under the constant attacks of Humungus, the settlers hatch a plan to escape the vermin on wheels and flee to the coast with their oil in tow. With the help of Max and a pilot called the Gyro Captain, the settlers are given a slim chance to survive. 
 
In The Road a Man risks all to protect his Boy and teach him survival skills in another bleak and nightmarish future where all plant and animal life is gone and the dominant humans subsist through murder and cannibalism.    

Which film is king of the outback/queen of the end times?

Find out!