Movies You May Not Have Seen #2

With so much Oscar discussion around Sideways (and the nominations it didn't get, especially since it's the critics' darling for this year) and especially around Virginia Madsen, I thought I'd bring up my favorite role of hers: the tortured call girl Yolanda/Nancy in Slam Dance. Directed by Wayne Wang, this 1987 noirish thriller starring Tom Hulce and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio pretty much disappeared without a trace when it came out, but it is still a favorite of mine even looking back on some of its quaint "underground" lifestyle depictions that were somewhat more shocking at the time.

An English lit professor of mine once said to me "An interesting failure is better than a boring success," and that always stuck with me because I think I'm drawn to the interesting failures (keyword there is interesting -- regular old failures are not that attractive!), very very strongly. Slam Dance is not necessarily a good movie all the way around, but much of it is very good -- most notably the cinematography, which is unlike anything I have ever seen on film and probably never will again as celluloid loses its prominence in filmmaking. feochadn explained to me once how Wang got the effect he did in this, but I can't remember what she told me; I only know what DVD (especially MGM's usually craptastic treatment of their discs) can't even begin to do it justice, and so the only people who will remember how astonishing this thing looks will be cranky old people like me who saw it in a theatre and went, "whoa." It's hard to explain to people who don't notice photography, but the blacks here are the richest, deepest blacks I've ever seen, pulling you into the dark corners of the movie in a way two dimensions shouldn't be able to. The lighting is jaw-dropping, from the neon-lit nightclub Hulce's character, C.C. Drood, hangs out in to the detail of peach-colored silk sheets that ripple like desert sand dunes. The landscapes of LA have never looked as gorgeous. Normally, people, when they're on film, tend to have a slight edge around their shapes, especially if they are lit from the side or back; here, the shots of people are edgeless even against deep blacks, and everything has the quality of a painting in some ways. There is, essentially, no gray scale in this movie. Whites are shockingly white, and Virginia Madsen's blond halo of hair, her pale porcelain skin, almost glow on the screen, especially in the nightclub scene where Drood first meets her.

I've never completely understood the story, and it gets tangled up in odd directions. Adam Ant plays Drood's best friend, the nightclub owner where the titular slam dancing takes place, and he's often hilarious -- he has a reaction to Hulce in one scene that induced me to laugh so hard my friend tried to drag me out of the theatre because I just couldn't stop laughing no matter how hard I tried. Other actors in the movie include Harry Dean Stanton and infant Robert Beltran from Voyager. There's a strange cameo from Millie Perkins that is so stiff, it makes you wonder about her performance as Ann Frank. In fact, most of the actors here are stiff and deliver their lines in these very old-fashioned noirish beats. Best of all is the soundtrack, I think: it's a fascinating mix of original stuff (some of it fleshed out by uberhipster John Lurie) and some cool songs by Stan Ridgway (of Wall of Voodoo "Mexican Radio" fame), the Fibonaccis, and a song that I still plan to vid to someday by Tim Scott. "Bing Can't Walk" and "Art Life" are two of the sickest, funniest songs I've ever heard, and I was thrilled recently when a friend made a CD copy of the vinyl-only soundtrack for me so I could listen to them again.

Even though Hulce and Mastrantonio are the stars, it's really Virginia Madsen you leave this movie remembering. Her haunted, sad, all-too-knowing character is the device around which the story is built, but she's more than just a device. We find out everything about her when we first see her in a stunning, sexy dress at the nightclub, coolly regarding Hulce with all his questions, but the longer he looks at her, the harder she finds it to keep her icy cool, and her face dissolves into a girlish grin and embarrassed giggles. She's really amazing in this movie, and every time someone comments on how surprised they are by her role in Sideways, how this "gorgeous actress has never had a chance to shine in the B-movie graveyard" she's worked in before, I want to point them to Slam Dance. It may be a B movie in many respects (though that wasn't the intention of the filmmakers, by any stretch), but it's an interesting failure, and Madsen is literally luminous. She seems to have been lit from within at times, and she actually appears to shine on the screen.

The DVD has both a pan and scan and widescreen choices, but that's all it offers. Not even a chapter listing insert. I'm glad that it's at least available; it was out of print for years and the soundtrack will never come out on disc, I'm sure. But if you're in the mood for a stylish, odd, indie noir that looks really good, it sure beats the heck out of all those boring successes.