there's no goddamn Alan Arkin thread, so here's a poll

he was brilliant in glengarry. haunting face.

also

https://www.criterion.com/explore/289-alan-arkin-s-top-10

and

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/4130-serpentine-serpentine-the-impeccable-madness-of-the-in-laws

Even though it's a crap movie he was funny in So I Married An Axe Murderer as the super-sensitive police captain.

Out of these, probably the In-Laws.

Big Trouble is a pretty trainwrescky reunion with Falk, but he does one of the all-time great spit takes.

i recommend seeing the '60s and '70s titles above

Little Murders is pretty great, but I think I'm gonna wait til I finally watch The In-Laws before voting.

I won't vote for it but I saw Wait Until Dark last month and forgot what a good, weird villain he played. It scared me to death as a kid

Big Trouble is indeed a mess. I've never seen Freebie and the Bean due to how appalling the scenes excerpted in The Celluloid Closet are, but if anyone wants to launch a defence of it, I'll listen.

Also, I'm glad he finally got an Oscar, but Little Miss Sunshine sucks.

probably The Heart is a Lonely Hunter for me

lmao argo fuck that movie. grosse point blank

His bit in Grosse Point Blank is a master class in worried underplaying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KlAbgjugmA

or rather:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZM4JlR4_2w

He can pretty much steal a film with a 5-10-minute role like that.

He plays a Nuyorican widower in Popi, which I probably haven't seen in 35 years.

I've never seen Freebie and the Bean due to how appalling the scenes excerpted in The Celluloid Closet are, but if anyone wants to launch a defence of it, I'll listen

Caan & Arkin have great chemistry, most of the movie is Lethal Weapon-style action-comedy 10 years ahead of schedule, and--although I haven't seen TCC--iirc the offensive material (which hoo-boy is it batshit and awful) actually only scuttles the last act of the film.

...so I took Freebie... off the shelf for this evening's entertainment, and--while not as bad as That One Character*--the presentation of Arkin and Valerie Harper as Mexicans is the 2nd place achievement of the very much 'of it's time' stereotyping and casual hate speech (at one point, Arkin compares Caan to Archie Bunker).

*Whose role in the story is actually genuinely clever and surprising.

haven't seen Freebie

i'm just fine w/ casual hate speech properly used in comedy, cf Bad News Bears

Voted Little Murders, more for his direction than his performance

fwiw, the parts of F&tB that I'm objecting to (again, excerpted and potentially taken out of context) go well beyond hate speech.

Voting for his Yossarian in Catch-22

His bit in /Grosse Point Blank/ is a master class in worried underplaying.

Voting for the one I have seen the most cast members of on the streets of New York.

probably not The Seven Percent Solution

(his Freud is a pip)

fwiw, the parts of F&tB that I'm objecting to (again, excerpted and potentially taken out of context) go well beyond hate speech.

― rhymes with "blondie blast" (cryptosicko), Friday, July 8, 2016 9:56 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

No, I know exactly what your referring to (I'm not getting specific because SPOILERS), and context doesn't really help re:that character, other than this was a film made in a less-enlightened time, and vicious caricatures of LBGT people were still acceptable in Hollywood films. I was just pointed out there was some lesser period ethnic nastiness in the film as well.

probably not The Seven Percent Solution

(his Freud is a pip)

haven't seen all of these but of the ones I have... probably Little Murders? Some of these are just terrible movies that he is nonetheless p good in.

i have no intention of seeing Little Miss Sunshine, ever, but i thought the poll needed more than 5 options

Feel like LMS is overrated

LMS is like an unfunny National Lampoon's Vacation.

my memory of Catch-22 is that it was a very flawed film with some bad choices in scripting, casting and direction, but Arkin was not to blame and delivered a good performance that kept the movie watchable, if sometimes exasperating.

In the same vein, my comment in the Little Miss Sunshine thread was:

I thought Arkin did wonders in making his badly-written character sort of humanlike, but that was an intellectual response, not an emotional one.

I remember liking "Freebie & the Bean" when I was, like, 14 back when 70s US movies like it were shown more or less every Sunday night on BBC2. Great cinematic education! Haven't seen it since.

Was always intrigued by Simon, either that or confused by the fact that there was also an electronic memory game with the same name, but never saw it.

Also, has it been discussed yet whether Alan Arkin and Allan Arbus ever worked together?

I really like the movie of Catch-22. Much better than MASH imo (the other big anti-war movie that came out the same year

the old VHS cover of Simon used to scare me in the late '80s as much as the one for Ryan O'Neal's So Fine.

Lol

Popi got turned into a television series starring Hector Elizondo, I think. Can't remember how long it lasted.

Not quite an old school half season. A little bit more than the television version of Freebie and the Bean which he was also in.

This thread reminded me of the Popi series — I watched one or two episodes at the time but it was a bit over my 12-year-old head. Wiki says it lasted 11 episodes.
xp

But he didn't only reprise Alan Arkin roles on television he also gave, since he didn't reenact his Obie award winning performance in Steambath, in the PBS version it was played by José Pérez, the "other" Latino actor of that time who lasted an entire season in the prison comedy On The Rocks. But Hector E. was all over the TV screen, memorably in a Popi-like role as a Puerto Rican janitor stuck in an elevator with his pregnant wife, Carroll O'Connor and Roscoe Lee Browne playing a businessman from Larchmont on All in the Family. Am curious about his performance as Captain Louis Renault in the prequel Casablanca (5 episodes)

Ha, Steambath, or should I say Bruce Jay Friedman's Steambath was also made into a short-lived series (6 episodes) in 1983, again with José Pérez. But I am very surprised to see that the Adam Arkin single man in the city series Busting Loose survived a full season.

Most surprising and most relevant is Alan Arkin's co-writer's credit on "The Banana Boat Song."

Which is disputed, this last

Is Mother Night a Kurt Vonnegut adaption? Ah yes, I see it is.

does Hector Elizondo still appear in every Garry Marshall film?

Looks like Alien, tastes like comedy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOj5wptt-BU

written and directed by '70s Woody collaborator Marshall Brickman; i'd like to see it!

i'm shocked to discover the library has it.

some echoes of Sleeper

does Hector Elizondo still appear in every Garry Marshall film?

― helpless before THRILLARY (Dr Morbius), Saturday, July 9, 2016 3:39 PM (25 minutes ago)

Huffpost says yes.

Long Simon clip with Madeline Kahn
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgB68DShwcM

Never heard of this film 'til today, but looks funny + Max Wright!

That's actually most of Kahn's role! The female lead is actually Judy Graubart of "The Electric Company."

It's very much worth seeing, Arkin has many brilliant moments, esp the "evolution" miming. There's a 'rockist' disco punchline.

The think tank is hilariously typecast: Austin Pendleton, Wallace Shawn, Max Wright, William Finley etc.

V curious

From what I saw of the think tank it was hilarious just looking at them.

Inspector Clouseau?

esp the "evolution" miming.

I think this was the poster art back in the day that caused:

the old VHS cover of Simon used to scare me in the late '80s as much as the one for Ryan O'Neal's So Fine.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, July 9, 2016 11:35 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Long time..

Watched In-Laws recently, drunkenly. IIRC there's a long kinda cringey stretch with a ''wacky'' banana-republic dictator, and some dicey stuff with an Asian jet pilot, and the supporting cast are all barely-extant morons, but you pull out this movie cause you wanna see Falk and Arkin interacting and it does deliver on that. There are several genuine laugh-out-loud sequences. If Falk's Columbo schtick doesn't do it for you, don't go near it IMHO.

voted the in-laws w/o hesitation. i remember the local college movie theater used to screen that thing like every other semester, i found out years later a couple of the guys who started the dissolve were programming it at the time.

Just realized that his delivery of "I'm the bombardier" in Catch-22 is echoed in the "I'm their father!" of Slums of Beverly Hills.

a long kinda cringey stretch with a ''wacky'' banana-republic dictator

translates as "brilliant"

btw google Senor Wences

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhfFwLewgmc

I watched the Criterion In-Laws about a week ago, it still makes me laugh v often considering the scenes w/ Nancy Dussault and the daughter are pretty worthless.

There's a good interview with Arkin where he talks about believing he would be fired every day when he began at Second City, so he leaned on 4 characters that went over well. Also said In-Laws was the first film role where he relaxed and had fun, and that he idolized Spencer Tracy bcz he made being a good person look difficult. (AA hated playing heavies, which is why he didn't do more after menacing Audrey Hepburn.)

I still think the stuff with the tinhorn dictator, and the James Hong scene in the airplane, range between unfunny and offensive... but there are some great scenes in that movie. Looks like I basically made this same post upthread so I'll add that the entire car chase sequence had us in stitches.

There's also an interview with James Hong, who's 88, where he says he improvised most of the plane safety instructions scene.

the old VHS cover of Simon used to scare me in the late '80s as much as the one for Ryan O'Neal's So Fine.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, 9 July 2016 11:35 (five years ago)

I like how the poster choice for the Wikipedia entry is the Italian one

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/So_Fine_(film)

I saw Simon on the big screen when I was 11, felt vaguely unnerved by it, and then rewatched it a couple of years ago. It's odd but not bad. What surprised me was seeing Judy Graubart of The Electric Company in it, which I see Dr Morbius already noted upthread.

Just watched him in PIG, altho really it could have been any debonair and authoritative older man, since it’s Cage’s film front-to-back.

I saw the man himself in a movie theater once with his family on the UWS. He was totally giving off the nervous brooding energy that the camera loves.

Highly recommend watching Deadhead Miles and Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins in succession. He's amazing in them both. They are searchable by title on YT...

RIP.

Seek out Little Murders.

TIL that Tony Sirico was in So Fine.

Joshua Then and Now (1985) should have been here. There is a an excellent extended CBC cut that you can find on YouTube

Also, a very big WTF on no one voting for The Seven-Per-Cent Solution or Edward Scissorhands

Just watched Little Murders this morning (it's on youtube), and I wish I liked it more. Arkin's acting bit was great, as was Donald Sutherland's, but the film's vibe kept me as a viewer at arm's length.

Little Murders works so brilliantly as both a play and a film. Jules Feiffer is a national treasure. An astoundingly brilliant mind.

Two, four, six, eight. Who do we assassinate?

Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins should have made the poll. It would have received at least as many votes as Freebie and the Bean.

Rafferty is definitely a charmer, but I’m not sure I’d place it above Freebie. Richard Rush was a really interesting filmmaker. Very lucky to have seen him at a screening of Freebie, actually