Tag Archives: Will Patton

IN THE SOUP

Steve Buscemi stars as a New York City nebbish with big dreams in Alexandre Rockwell’s In the Soup

IN THE SOUP (Alexandre Rockwell, 1992)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, June 29
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.factorytwentyfive.com

The 2018 Tribeca Film Festival might have hosted gala anniversary screenings of Scarface and Schindler’s List at the Beacon with impressive rosters of superstar guests and high price tags, but the one to see was Alexandre Rockwell’s 1992 black-and-white indie cult classic, In the Soup. If you missed that reunion, you have another chance to catch the film on the big screen when it opens June 29 at IFC Center. The twenty-fifth-anniversary screening is a case of life imitating art (imitating life): The black comedy is about the fabulously named Adolpho Rollo (Steve Buscemi), a ne’er-do-well New Yorker living in a run-down apartment building, working on his master opus, a five-hundred-page screenplay called Unconditional Surrender that he believes will change the face of cinema itself. A familiar New York story? Perhaps, but the film was largely unfamiliar to almost everyone but the most dedicated enthusiasts, since it has been out of circulation for most of its existence. A few years ago, In the Soup was down to one last, damaged archival print, but distribution company Factory 25 began a Kickstarter campaign to restore the film in time for its quarter-century anniversary, somewhat mimicking Adolpho’s efforts to get his movie made — which, in turn, is based on Rockwell’s attempts to make In the Soup in the first place, as many of the characters and situations in the film are based on real people and actual events.

With wanna-be gangster brothers Louis Barfardi (Steven Randazzo) and Frank Barfardi (Francesco Messina) breathing down his neck for the rent, Adolpho decides to sell the last thing of value (at least in his mind) that he owns, his screenplay. (In real life, Rockwell sold his saxophone to help get In the Soup financed.) His first offer is not quite what he imagined, involving a pair of cable TV producers played by Jim Jarmusch and Carol Kane. But next he meets Joe (Seymour Cassel), an older, white-haired teddy bear of a man who may or may not be connected. Joe is so excited about making a movie that he can’t stop hugging and kissing — and even getting in bed with — a confused Adolpho, who really has nowhere else to turn. Adolpho wants his next-door neighbor, Angelica (Jennifer Beals, who was married to Rockwell at the time), to star in his film, but she wants nothing to do with him, although he does succeed in making Angelica’s estranged, and plenty strange, husband, Gregoire (Stanley Tucci), mighty jealous. Adolpho is also terrified of Joe’s mysterious, apparently rather dangerous, brother, Skippy (Will Patton). Little by little, the money starts coming in, but Adolpho and Joe start having creative differences about fundraising and moviemaking, leading to a series of even odder situations with more bizarre characters.

Adolpho Rollo (Steve Buscemi) meets a strange bedfellow (Seymour Cassel) in indie cult classic

A kind of cousin to Jarmusch’s 1984 gem, Stranger than Paradise, Rockwell’s third feature (following Hero and Sons) was made on a shoestring budget, shot in color by cinematographer Phil Parmet but then transferred to black-and-white to obtain a stark, drenched look. Veteran character actor and Cassavetes regular Cassel and up-and-coming actor/fireman Buscemi form a great comic duo, Cassel filling Joe with an unquenchable thirst for all life has to offer, Buscemi imbuing Adolpho with a rigid, sheltered view of existence, a young man lost in his own warped reality. “My father died the day I was born. I was raised by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Friedrich Nietzsche,” Adolpho says, as if that’s a good thing. Patton is a riot as the menacing Skippy, while Beals and Tucci have fun with their accents. The fab cast also includes Debi Mazar as Suzie, Elizabeth Bracco as Jackie, Sully Boyar as the old man, Pat Moya as Joe’s companion, Dang, Ruth Maleczech as Adolpho’s mother, Michael J. Anderson as a drug dealer, and Sam Rockwell (no relation to Alexandre) as Angelica’s brother, Pauli. In the Soup is also a great New York City film, with several awesome locations. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, beating out Allison Anders’s Gas Food Lodging and Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (Cassel also won for acting), but the distribution company handling the picture went bankrupt shortly after releasing it, resulting in its scarce availability, which was a shame, because it’s an absolute treasure. But now it’s back and looking better than ever. (Coincidentally, Rockwell, Anders, and Tarantino were three of the quartet of directors who made the 1995 omnibus Four Rooms, along with Robert Rodriguez.) Buscemi and Alexandre Rockwell, who went on to make such other films as Somebody to Love, 13 Moons, and Pete Smalls Is Dead (with many of the actors from In the Soup), will take part in a Q&A following the 7:15 show on opening night at IFC.

TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL RETROSPECTIVE SPECIAL SCREENING: TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY OF IN THE SOUP

Steve Buscemi stars as a New York City nebbish with big dreams in Alexandre Rockwell’s In the Soup

IN THE SOUP (Alexandre Rockwell, 1992)
SVA Theater 1 Silas
333 West Twenty-Third St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday, April 24, $25.94, 7:30
Tribeca Film Festival runs April 18-29
www.tribecafilm.com
www.factorytwentyfive.com

The 2018 Tribeca Film Festival might be hosting gala anniversary screenings of Scarface and Schindler’s List at the Beacon with impressive rosters of superstar guests and high price tags, but the one to see is Alexandre Rockwell’s 1992 black-and-white indie cult classic, In the Soup, which is being shown April 24 at the SVA Theater. The twenty-fifth anniversary screening is a case of life imitating art (imitating life): The black comedy is about the fabulously named Adolpho Rollo (Steve Buscemi), a ne’er-do-well New Yorker living in a run-down apartment building, working on his master opus, a five-hundred-page screenplay called Unconditional Surrender that he believes will change the face of cinema itself. A familiar New York story? Perhaps, but the film was largely unfamiliar to almost everyone but the most dedicated enthusiasts, since it has been out of circulation for most of its existence. A few years ago, In the Soup was down to one last, damaged archival print, but distribution company Factory 25 began a Kickstarter campaign to restore the film in time for its quarter-century anniversary, somewhat mimicking Adolpho’s efforts to get his movie made — which, in turn, is based on Rockwell’s attempts to make In the Soup in the first place, as many of the characters and situations in the film are based on real people and actual events. With wanna-be gangster brothers Louis Barfardi (Steven Randazzo) and Frank Barfardi (Francesco Messina) breathing down his neck for the rent, Adolpho decides to sell the last thing of value (at least in his mind) that he owns, his screenplay. (In real life, Rockwell sold his saxophone to help get In the Soup financed.) His first offer is not quite what he imagined, involving a pair of cable TV producers played by Jim Jarmusch and Carol Kane. But next he meets Joe (Seymour Cassel), an older, white-haired teddy bear of a man who may or may not be connected. Joe is so excited about making a movie that he can’t stop hugging and kissing — and even getting in bed with — a confused Adolpho, who really has nowhere else to turn. Adolpho wants his next-door neighbor, Angelica (Jennifer Beals, who was married to Rockwell at the time), to star in his film, but she wants nothing to do with him, although he does succeed in making Angelica’s estranged, and plenty strange, husband, Gregoire (Stanley Tucci), mighty jealous. Adolpho is also terrified of Joe’s mysterious, apparently rather dangerous, brother, Skippy (Will Patton). Little by little, the money starts coming in, but Adolpho and Joe start having creative differences about fundraising and moviemaking, leading to a series of even odder situations with more bizarre characters.

Adolpho Rollo (Steve Buscemi) meets a strange bedfellow (Seymour Cassel) in indie cult classic

A kind of cousin to Jarmusch’s 1984 gem, Stranger than Paradise, Rockwell’s third feature (following Hero and Sons) was made on a shoestring budget, shot in color by cinematographer Phil Parmet but then transferred to black-and-white to obtain a stark, drenched look. Veteran character actor and Cassavetes regular Cassel and up-and-coming actor/fireman Buscemi form a great comic duo, Cassel filling Joe with an unquenchable thirst for all life has to offer, Buscemi imbuing Adolpho with a rigid, sheltered view of existence, a young man lost in his own warped reality. “My father died the day I was born. I was raised by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Friedrich Nietzsche,” Adolpho says, as if that’s a good thing. Patton is a riot as the menacing Skippy, while Beals and Tucci have fun with their accents. The fab cast also includes Debi Mazar as Suzie, Elizabeth Bracco as Jackie, Sully Boyar as the old man, Pat Moya as Joe’s companion, Dang, Ruth Maleczech as Adolpho’s mother, Michael J. Anderson as a drug dealer, and Sam Rockwell (no relation to Alexandre) as Angelica’s brother, Pauli. In the Soup is also a great New York City film, with several awesome locations. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, beating out Allison Anders’s Gas Food Lodging and Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (Cassel also won for acting), but the distribution company handling the picture went bankrupt shortly after releasing it, resulting in its scarce availability, which was a shame, because it’s an absolute treasure. But now it’s back and looking better than ever. (Coincidentally, Rockwell, Anders, and Tarantino were three of the quartet of directors who made the 1995 omnibus Four Rooms, along with Robert Rodriguez.) Alexandre Rockwell, who went on to make such other films as Somebody to Love, 13 Moons, and Pete Smalls Is Dead (with many of the actors from In the Soup), will take part in a conversation following the Tribeca Film Festival screening, joined by Buscemi, Beals, Sam Rockwell, and Parmet.

THE ANTIPODES

A group of men and women gathers around a table telling stories in Annie Baker’s The Antipodes (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 11, $30 through May 14, $90 after
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

Near the beginning of Annie Baker’s first play for her Residency Five program at the Signature Theatre, John, a character declares, “Tell me a story.” Baker takes that conceit to a whole new level in her follow-up, The Antipodes, which has been extended at the Signature through June 11. The set-up is essentially fairly simple: a group of coworkers sit in ergonomic chairs around a table in an office, where they spend their days sharing deeply personal tales that might or might not lead to the one that their boss, Sandy (Will Patton), needs as he seeks material for a successor to their biggest hit, Heathens. The audience, sitting on two sides of Laura Jellinek’s pristine set, never learns what kind of company the seven men and two women work for — but it’s apparently at least somewhat bureaucratic and corporate, as Josh (Josh Hamilton) has to fill out forms over and over in an ongoing effort to try to get his ID. The tale they seek involves monsters, but no dwarves, elves, or trolls; they could be making movies, video games, apps, or an animated television series, although it doesn’t really matter, because it’s all about the stories themselves. “There are seven types of stories in the world,” Dave (Josh Charles) says, while Danny M1 (Danny Mastrogiorgio) claims there are thirty-six, Josh ten, and Brian (Brian Miskell) eighteen. They share intimate sexual episodes, moments that shaped their lives, and random tales that go nowhere. Josh philosophizes about the nature of time, Eleanor (Emily Cass McDonnell) doesn’t understand why she can’t use her cell phone, Danny M2 (Danny McCarthy) is hesitant to contribute, and Adam (Phillip James Brannon) remembers being hit by lightning. Scenes often end in the middle of a discussion, then pick up in the midst of a new topic, with no clear delineation of the time change except when Sarah (Nicole Rodenburg), Sandy’s assistant — who knows more than she’s letting on — arrives to take lunch orders, wearing a different chic outfit each time, courtesy of costume designer Kaye Voyce. While it doesn’t appear that they are accomplishing anything, Sandy, a straight shooter who is having some issues at home, pushes them to keep going. “I just wanted to remind all of you that what you’re doing is important. We need stories. As a culture. It’s what we live for. These are dark times. Stories are a little bit of light that we can cup in our palms like votive candles to show us the way out of the forest.” Even Brian, the note-taker and researcher, gets in on the action. But the team starts getting nervous when Sandy suddenly doesn’t show up one day.

Dave (Josh Charles) and Adam (Phillip James Brannon) listen to others’ stories in latest exceptional work by Annie Baker (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Antipodes, which sounds like a mythical monster but actually means “contrary” or “the exact opposite,” has all the makings of a pretentious play about the art of playwrighting, a work about the writer’s struggle to come up with a good idea, but Pulitzer Prize winner Baker (The Flick, Circle Mirror Transformation), who wrote the two-hour show specifically for the Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre, proves that it’s not that obvious. Instead, it’s a carefully crafted existential take on everyday existence, on the things humans do to get by, from eating and drinking to having sex, from going to work and communicating with others to dealing with life’s little problems. “We can do anything,” Sandy points out, as if he’s speaking for Baker the playwright, who is firmly in control. The show is also about the concept of time, which in a play can be manipulated by the writer. “There are two kinds of time. Vertical and horizontal. And if something happens in horizontal time, it can be . . . it’s not permanent,” Josh explains. “You can reverse it. Like one of them is the time that we think of when we think of normal time that’s moving forward and you can’t go back. But then there’s another kind of time and if you do something in that kind of time you can . . . uh . . . it’s more flexible.” Director Lila Neugebauer, who has done an extraordinary job navigating through time and space in such complex multicharacter dramas as The Wayside Motor Inn, The Wolves, and Everybody, makes every movement count, never allowing the narrative flow to drag, whether by way of a bit of magic about where lunch comes from or Adam lying on the floor to tell “the first story ever told.” The actors form an utterly believable group, fellow employees with unique personalities, some of whom bond while others remain outsiders, just as in real life. “The stories we create teach people what it’s like to be someone else on a visceral level,” Sandy tells his crew. “As storytellers we know how to shift perspective and inhabit different viewpoints. Imagine what would happen if everyone in the world could do every once in a while what we already do on a daily basis. It would be revolutionary.” The Antipodes is another exceptional play from one of the theater’s finest minds, a writer who is never afraid of going for the revolutionary in her work.

GOING STEADI — 40 YEARS OF STEADICAM: AFTER HOURS

Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) nightmare starts innocently enough while reading Henry Millers Tropic of Cancer in a diner in AFTER HOURS

Paul Hackett’s (Griffin Dunne) nightmare starts innocently enough while reading Henry Miller’s TROPIC OF CANCER in a coffee shop in AFTER HOURS

AFTER HOURS (Martin Scorsese, 1985)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Sunday, December 25, 6:00, and Monday, January 2, 9:15
Series runs through January 3
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.org

“We are all alone here and we are dead,” Henry Miller writes in the first paragraph of Tropic of Cancer, which is the book narcissistic word processor Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) is reading in a New York City coffee shop, catapulting him into a harrowing downtown nightmare in Martin Scorsese’s brilliant horror comedy, After Hours. Dunne, in one of his two best roles — the other was in John Landis’s very different horror comedy, 1981’s An American Werewolf in London — is exceptional as Hackett, a stand-in for the proverbial everyman seeking safety and home but bedeviled by circumstance, again and again and again. At the coffee shop, Hackett meets charming but unpredictable Marcy Franklin (Roseanna Arquette), who invites him over to her friend’s loft in SoHo. It’s already late, but the titillated Upper East Sider decides to takes a cab downtown; however, the last of his money, a twenty-dollar bill, literally flies out the window as his taxi driver (Larry Block) speeds like a madman through the mean streets of Manhattan. These eighties days predate ATMs, cashback, and Ubers, and Hackett spends the rest of his very long night encountering a bizarre cast of characters, none of whom seems able to give him the fifty-three cents he needs to cover the new subway fare of $1.50, which rose suddenly at midnight, plunging him into after-hours chaos. Among those he meets are kinky sculptor Kiki Bridges (Linda Fiorentino) and her sadist lover, Horst (Will Patton); lonely cocktail waitress and sixties leftover Julie (Teri Garr); helpful bartender Tom (John Heard); possible thieves Neil (Cheech Marin) and Pepe (Tommy Chong); ice-cream-truck driver Gail (Catherine O’Hara); and lonely lady June (Verna Bloom). Not the best judge of character, at least partly because he’s not exactly a sympathetic listener, the Yuppie-ish Hackett is soon running through the streets of SoHo in the rain, chased by an angry vigilante mob.

Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) has plenty to scream about after meeting sculptor Kiki Bridges (Linda Fiorentino) in Martin Scorsese’s brilliant black comedy

Written as a film-school project by Joseph Minion and inspired by Joe Frank’s monologue “Lies” (which led to a plagiarism battle), After Hours is shot in a modern noir style by regular Scorsese cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (Goodfellas, The Last Temptation of Christ, The Departed). Much of the film takes place in dark rooms and spaces; at one point, inside the S&M Berlin Club, Scorsese himself, in a cameo as a stage tech, shines a spotlight right into the camera, temporarily blinding the viewer. The many dichotomies in the film range from light and dark to uptown/downtown to fire and water; there are multiple references to fire and burns, as if Paul is trapped in a kind of hell, and it is often raining as he tries to find a way out. Paul’s metaphorical impotency is also a major theme; he keeps meeting women who are sexually attracted to him, but just as he can’t get north of SoHo, he has no luck in various bedrooms, for various reasons. In a bathroom, he sees a drawing of a shark chomping on an erect penis, and it’s no coincidence that Gail drives a Mr. Softee truck. The film also features cameos by character actors Clarence Felder as a bouncer, Dick Miller, Rocco Sisto, and Victor Argo as diner and coffee-shop employees, and Bronson Pinchot as Paul’s ambitious coworker, while the fab score ranges from Mozart and Bach to Joni Mitchell, the Monkees, Bad Brains, and Peggy Lee. A ferocious, fast-paced fantasia about abject loneliness, pretentious art, and the ever-present prospect of death, After Hours is screening December 25 and January 2 at the Walter Reade Theater as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Going Steadi: 40 Years of Steadicam,” which consists of twenty-nine films that feature the use of the Steadicam, invented by Garrett Brown and first used in 1976 in Hal Ashby’s Bound for Glory; the Steadicam operator for After Hours was one of the masters, Larry McConkey (Goodfellas, The Silence of the Lambs, Kill Bill). The series runs through January 3 and also includes Goodfellas, Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown, Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut and The Shining, Warren Beatty’s Bulworth, Bertrand Tavernier’s Coup de Torchon, Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights and Magnolia.