The 2001 James Dean Meditation Almost Salinas Is a Colossal Waste for Everyone Except People Writing Up Every Virginia Madsen Movie And Film About the Movie Industry
I regret that I must inform you that this movie is nowhere near as exciting or action-packed as this image makes it seem.
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Sometimes I will come up with an idea for a blog post and write it up immediately. That’s what happened when I saw that right-wing dingbat Dan Bongino had written an angry tweet to Stephen King in which he admonished him to stop jerking off to porn in his mama’s basement and get a job. I found that shit so hilarious that I instantly knew that I had to cover it for The Big Whoop.
Sometimes I will come up with an idea for a Big Whoop blog post and it will marinate in my mind and my imagination for days, even weeks before I finally get around to writing about it. And sometimes I’ll come up with an idea for a blog post and never get around to writing it up at all.
For months now I have contemplated writing a blog post with the title, “How the Hell Am I Going to Get All of This Shit Done?” That’s because every day I think about the work endemic in single-handedly running a website, cohosting a podcast, writing a Substack newsletter, writing a massive book about the film industry that involves watching and writing up three hundred and sixty five movies and freelancing and wonder how the hell I am going to get all of that shit done without killing myself or going crazy.
Time management has never been more important to me. I’ve never had more work to do or less time to get it all done on account of my wife is the main breadwinner in the home so I spend a lot more time at home looking after our children, particularly our four year old.
So I am obscenely grateful for work that checks off multiple boxes and allows me to work on multiple massive projects simultaneously. That, strangely enough, is true of 2001’s Almost Salinas.
It’s one of the many movies Virginia Madsen has made that are so deservedly obscure that even I did not not know that they exist and I have been writing about pop culture for twenty-six years and writing up Madsen’s complete filmography for what now feels like at least a decade.
It’s possible that I’ve actually been writing up all of Madsen’s movies for a considerably shorter amount of time but once you pass a certain age your relationship with time becomes much fuzzier and more indistinct and I am VERY old at this point.
Almost Salinas consequently checks off the “Thursday Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place main feature” and “Virginia Madsen filmography” boxes but it also, thankfully, qualifies for my book The Fractured Mirror.
That’s because this sleepy waste of everyone’s time and energy is about the making of a movie that looks bad and cheesy but not quite as bad or as cheesy as Almost Salinas itself.
The movie in question is a biopic of James Dean that is looking to shoot at a diner near where the Rebel Without a Cause star had his fatal crash for the sake of verisimilitude.
John Mahoney stars as Max Harris, a diner owner with a haunted expression whose cause will surprise and enrage you if you’re anything like me but it’s so fucking stupid that I feel like I must share it with you because, let’s face it, there is absolutely no way you’re going to waste 93 minutes of your time left on earth watching this movie.
I would not watch Almost Salinas unless I was professionally obligated to do so for multiple reasons. I would certainly not watch it for pleasure on account of it providing none. It’s a sappy sitcom of a movie that belongs on television, not on a big screen.
The suspiciously sparse film production shakes up the romantic and personal lives of the diner’s employees, most notably comic relief Mexican chef Manny (Ian Gomez) and beautiful Clare (Virginia Madsen).
The diner in the death tourism as well as food industry develop friendships and flirtations with the movie folks while Max gets close to a woman who is writing a story on the re-opening of a small town diner during what I can only imagine the driest news spell in journalism history.
The middle aged journalist is on hand to remind our crusty hero that there’s more to life than business and gloomily ruminating about the past but she’s really on hand to deliver a key piece of information.
If, for the love of God, you are planning on watching Almost Salinas and don’t want the movie spoiled stop reading now although, as is generally the case, Almost Salinas’ stupid twist spoils the movie worse than any critic’s spoiler possibly could.
It turns out that the protagonist is playing Grouchy McGateKeeper and acting like the ultimate expert on James Dean’s crash because (again, stop reading if you don’t want spoilers) HE WAS IN THE OTHER CAR!
That’s right: Max’s car was the other vehicle in the accident that awful, fateful night and even though he was cleared of any wrongdoing he still understandably feels a little guilty about the central role he played in the legendary premature death of one of the greatest icon ever to adorn the walls of thousands of crappy diners, often accompanied by some combination of Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart, Buddy Holly and/or Kurt Cobain.
Rather than leave and never come back, Max instead decides to stick around forever so that he can be reminded, every day of his life, that James Dean is dead and he was there at the bitter end.
I’m a bit of a wimp when it comes to reliving trauma from my past. I have this weird attitude where I want to avoid being reminded of the worst moments of my life.
If I were involved in the car crash responsible for the death of James Dean, for example, and I was looking for a place to settle down I would want to spend my golden years as far away from the death sight as possible.
I’d go further than that. I would forbid everyone I knew from ever mentioning James Dean in my presence. Not our Max. He decides to set up permanent shop at the busy intersection of Trauma Street and Death Boulevard.
It’s a stupid fucking twist for a movie that otherwise has nothing going for it, though Madsen is, as always, a professional. Madsen does here what professionals do: they smile pretty, swallow their pride and do the best damn job possible under the circumstances.
Even so, I don’t understand what attracted an actress of Madsen’s caliber to a project like this. The erotic thrillers Virginia Madsen made in the early 1990s were no masterpieces but at least she had the biggest, juiciest role and got to play larger-than-life, over-the-top femme fatales.
In Almost Salinas, however, Madsen is just a nice waitress with a pretty smile who gets a little taste of show business flash and is intrigued. That’s all there is to the character and brother that ain’t much!
Thankfully, just as knowing that Look Who’s Taking or Pulp Fiction lurked just around the corner, knowing that soon Madsen will have her Oscar-nominated role of a lifetime in Sideways makes it easier to suffer through movies like this, which makes almost perversely terrible use of the actress’ ethereal yet earthy beauty as well her formidable talent, magnetic presence and fierce yet casual intelligence.
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