By DONALD PORTER
Standard-Examiner staff
SALT LAKE CITY -- Lou Diamond Phillips sat in a chair against the wall of his Little America Hotel suite, in the shadow of a lamp that wasn't turned on.
The 25-year-old actor was dressed smartly -- tan sports coat, shirt with two buttons open at the neck, blue jeans and cowboy boots. Longish black hair fell over his collar. Without a trace of cockiness, Phillips acknowledged that he's on the verge of something that may be very big -- big with a capital B.
Test audiences have been indicating that his new film is "hot." That's a good word to have connected with a movie. Almost as good as "big," as in box office. Those two words spell success in Hollywood. They're the ticket to the big time. Yes, if indications are correct, big things could be happening to Phillips soon. Then he would be -- that's right -- hot.
By DONALD PORTER
Standard-Examiner staff
There's a chilling scene in "The Untouchables" in which Al Capone's hit man, Frank Nitti, sits in a car outside G-man Eliot Ness' home, smoking cigarettes. Ness isn't home, but when he does arrive, after dark, Nitti expounds on the virtues of family life.
It's Nitti's way of letting Ness know that if Capone continues to be harassed, Ness' wife and child will be murdered. It would be easy, Nitti intimates by his presence outside the home, for him to have walked in and snuffed out their lives.
In the movie, Nitti is a dastardly, evil character. But in reality, the actor who played him -- Billy Drago -- is soft-spoken and unassuming. And Drago says he's loving the attention the movie has given him.
"I have literally not been able to go on the street one day since the picture opened without somebody coming up, or being in a restaurant and having someone say something to me," Drago said last week during a telephone interview from his Los Angeles home. "It happens everywhere I go."
By DONALD PORTER
Standard-Examiner staff
A ponderous, meandering beast of a crime epic, Martin Scorsese’s “Casino” takes many greatish elements and reduces them to tedious mediocrities.
Scorsese is a filmmaker with an affinity for stories about mobsters and their peculiar manner of doing business -- he directed “Mean Streets” and “GoodFellas,” the latter of which is one of the finest films released since 1990. So he seems a natural for this tale of a mob-run Las Vegas casino in the ‘70s, before corporate America took the gaming racket away from organized crime.
Alas, Scorsese’s affinity for the minutiae of the gambling industry hobbles “Casino,” diverting attention from the characters and the story at hand: how gambler Sam “Ace” Rothstein and his childhood friend, Nicky Santoro, managed to screw up a gig that not only managed itself, but was also making them fabulously wealthy.
Given that Michael Mann's latest film, "Public Enemies," is still in (a few) theaters, I thought I'd post my review of "Heat," which was a lot of fun. I especially liked the after-heist shootout through the streets of Los Angeles, which oddly enough would be played out in real life not too long afterward.
“Heat” is on with great acting, writing, intensity
By DONALD PORTER
Standard-Examiner staff
There is an action scene in “Heat” that is as visceral and powerful as any filmed in years: Four bank robbers are attempting to make their getaway, but they’re encircled by cops in downtown Los Angeles. Both sides are heavily armed, and writer-director Michael Mann, instead of showing us the resulting shootout, puts his audience smack-dab in the middle of it.
For all of the violent action flicks being made, few have ever matched this portion of “Heat.” Words like “intense” and “powerful” come up short.
