In our last episode we looked at Grace Kelly, whose career was cut short by her own choice. She was given the option to be treated like a princess, or to go out and actually be an honest-to-god Princess.
She chose both love and duty, since you can’t really Princess and be a movie star at the same time. Fair.
In today’s episode, we look at a career that was cut short because the actor, who was otherwise very bright and talented, couldn’t reel in his demons. River Phoenix died at the age of 23, of an overdose on Halloween night in 1993, collapsing outside a club he’d just left.
The first film we’ll be reviewing is the second film in his filmography, Stand By Me, directed by Rob Reiner. (Please note that Sean and I recorded this episode before Reiner’s untimely death, which is why it’s not addressed here.) Stand By Me is an adaptation of a Stephen King novella called The Body, and manages to improve on the original, possibly because King wasn’t obviously writing for an eventual movie audience (a reason I mostly quit reading his stuff). The story follows four boys over a couple of days during the summer before they got to high school, on a journey to recover the body of someone who’d gone missing. They find the body, but they also find a lot of insights in each other.
Running on Empty is an interesting film by Sidney Lumet that, in our opinion, doesn’t get enough love.
Judd Hirsch and Christine Lahti play a married couple forced to go underground when their activist ways take an unfortunate turn and someone is accidentally killed. Now, that event took place nearly twenty years earlier, so it’s mostly relevant as the setup to the film.
In the present day, they have two boys: one is a tween and the other (Phoenix) is nearing the end of his high school career. Because of the parents’ situation, they’re forced to move frequently, take odd jobs and depend on old friends to cover for them. It’s a cool take on the “sins of the fathers” argument, as their lives are having an effect on their oldest son, who is a talented musician and could conceivably miss out on getting a Juilliard education. Further complicating matters is his rapidly developing relationship with a girl at his school, played by Martha Plimpton. How does the entire family navigate these complications?
COMING ATTRACTIONS:
We’re going to spend the next five episodes dealing with limited series, what the kids used to call miniseries. Our next episode will be the series version of Fanny and Alexander by Ingmar Bergman, which was eventually cut down into a feature-length film. We’re going though all 312 minutes, though! Join us, won’t you?:
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