At the end of the number he crouched on the floor panting for a good 30 seconds
At the end of the number, he crouched on the floor panting for a good 30 seconds. Tyrone, by the way, is played by Scott Sherrin, a bandana-wearing dude whose torso ripples under a string vest. It was never going to win an Olivier for Services to Finesse – how could it with that many leg-warmers, patchwork floppy hats and back-to-front baseball caps on show? But the energy expended – especially on a hot night – was astonishing. Michael Winner was there, too, but he, like the poor, is always with us
The production was as breathtaking as the guest-list. I had the unsettling experience of sitting next to Hollywood’s favourite rent-a-psycho, the poker-faced Dennis Hopper. Dressed in an immaculate pinstriped suit, he looked ready to audition for The Godfather IV These were people who lived up to the show’s title. To win one of these, phone 0171-266 3874 today between 4.00pm and 5.30pm stating your choice of prize (give two alternatives)..
The celebrity A-list had been whistled up for the first night of Fame – the Musical: Elle MacPherson, Alan Yentob and Chris Eubank (wearing shorts and boxing boots lest we forgot what he does when he is not attending premieres). The season is being sponsored by JVC to promote its revolutionary television, the Dolby Pro Logic 3D-PHONIC, whose technology creates the impression of three-dimensional surround sound with two inbuilt speakers. On offer are: five annual memberships to the National Film Theatre, 10 pairs of tickets to any film listed above and two pairs of tickets to the Julien Temple interview (21 July, 6.30). But no plot synopsis can correctly convey the deep strangeness of this baggy, meandering, mercurial piece: so often, in movies, small- town Middle America is portrayed as cosily whimsical, but here, filtered through Kusterica’s Middle-European, almost surreal, sensibility, it becomes an absurd, melancholy place of enchanted flying fish and stubborn dreams. Completed months later, it was released briefly in America in 1993. Now finally it surfaces in Britain bearing the stamp of a cult film, or a film maudit.Johnny Depp plays another of his spacey loners, a New York fish inspector who travels to Arizona for the wedding of his uncle (Jerry Lewis), a struggling car salesman, and falls for the flaky charms of Faye Dunaway’s glamorous older woman. Begun in 1991, shooting was closed down when Kusterica had a breakdown and the production soared way over budget.
His fourth film, Arizona Dream, looks in some ways like the blot on his copybook. But this is still a provocative, fascinating film.Emir Kusterica, from the former Yugoslavia, might not be well-known in Britain but he has had a spectacular career: a Golden Palm for his second film, When Father Was Away on Business, in 1985; the Best Director Prize at Cannes for his third, Time of the Gypsies, in 1989; and another Golden Palm last month for Underground. The funniest / spookiest scenes show him with his two brothers, both of them equally artistically precocious but, unlike him, completely unable to cope with the world. Detached, sniggering, Crumb looks embarrassed by his eccentric siblings, and his decision to move to France at the end of the film looks like an abandonment (one brother, the brilliant, tormented Charles, later committed suicide).
Crumb is poorly-structured and a little too long. And there are some glaring omissions: it skates nippily over the influence of illegal pharmaceuticals on Crumb’s art (there’s a brief mention of his once having taken something similar to, but not the same as, LSD), and remains silent on the fate of his two sisters, who declined to be interviewed for the film – a rather large gap in a movie claiming to be a portrait of a dysfunctional family (perhaps they were too well-adjusted?). But he emerged as a virulent racist and misogynist (a typical fantasy: rough sex with a big-bottomed but headless woman); and astonishingly self-absorbed, too.