Shards From the Fractured Mirror: Best Worst Movie, Clerks III, My Life's in Turnaround, The Shadow of the Vampire and Stardust Memories
For the last year and a half or so much of my time and energy has been devoted to working on The Fractured Mirror, my upcoming book about movies about the movie business. I’ve posted much longer versions of some of the pieces that I’ve written for the book on this website but the vast majority I only shared with people who pre-ordered the book through Kickstarter and Backerkit or who donate to this site’s Patreon page.
I’m quite proud of the work I’ve done on the book, as well as the kooky assortment of movies I’ve covered so I figured that every month I would share a handful of pieces I’ve written for The Fractured Mirror with y’all. I’ve written up 337 movies so far and will cover 400 in total so I am very open to recommendations on movies to write about.
In conclusion, please donate to my site’s Patreon page or pre-order The Fractured Mirror over at Backerkit. I desperately need the income and I’d love to share these new pieces with as many people as possible.
Best Worst Movie (2006) FM
Some people go to therapy to process childhood trauma. Michael Paul Stephenson, who starred in Troll 2 as a child actor and lived to tell the tale, instead made 2009’s Best Worst Movie, a crowd-pleasing documentary that established him as a young filmmaker of real promise, not just someone with a uniquely colorful childhood.
As the alternately cursed and blessed star of Troll 2, an all-time stinker that famously has nothing to do with 1986’s Trolls and also confusingly has no trolls in it, Stephenson had two very different professional father figures.
George Hardy, who played Stephenson’s hospitality-obsessed father, is a lovable goof who is a dorky dad not just to Stephenson and his own progeny but to seemingly everyone in his life. He’s a perpetually smiling, upbeat full-time dentist tickled pink by Troll 2’s robust second life as a beloved cult movie of the so-bad-it’s-good variety.
Stephenson’s other father figure, Italian Troll 2 director Claudio Fragasso, meanwhile, serves as the dark and brooding yin to Hardy’s sunny, optimistic yang. Fragasso is confused, insulted and also oddly flattered by the film’s cult status because he is convinced that he and his screenwriter wife made a good movie about serious issues, not something to laugh at.
Margo Prey, who played Stephenson’s spooky-eyed mother, shares Fragasso’s poignant delusion that Troll 2 is a deeply humane masterpiece finally being appreciated for its artistic worth and not its camp value.
Troll 2 attracted an army of fans who appreciate it in a way that’s both ironic and sincere. The film’s cast, who are every bit as eccentric and sad as you would expect, embrace the film’s curious popularity as a high point in film careers that ended pretty much where they began, with a crushing failure that became a cult success.
Best Worst Movie is a hilarious tragedy chockablock with unlikely triumph. It’s a very good movie about a film so legendarily, transcendently terrible that it’s actually pretty great.
Clerks III (2022)
Writer-director Kevin Smith returned to the Clerks franchise a mere sixteen years after the release of 2006’s Clerks II in order to pay reverent homage to one of his all-time favorite filmmakers—himself—and one of his favorite films in 1994’s Clerks, the scruffy little indie that could.
The late in the game sequel was inspired by a heart attack Smith experienced in 2018. In what I think we can safely say is the concluding entry in the Clerks trilogy smart-ass former video store clerk Randall Graves (Jeff Anderson) has a heart attack that causes him to re-examine a life largely devoid of achievement.
So the suddenly ambitious slacker decides to make an autobiographical movie about his life and the life of his best buddy Dante Hicks (Brian O’Halloran) and their jobs working at a convenience store.
The movie that Randall makes with the help of producer/star Dante and the wacky weed-selling duo of Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Smith) isn’t just like Clerks; it is Clerks.
Randall may have no training or experience making films but he follows doggedly in the footsteps of Smith, another homemade auteur with a similar lack of credentials.
This time around the convenience store in the endlessly self-referential filmmaker’s latest tribute to himself and his storied past primarily sells Easter eggs of the winkingly self-referential entertainment variety rather than the kind children collect.
Smith is perversely if predictably intent on recreating his most beloved film beat by beat in Clerks III’s extremely familiar film-within-a-film but Clerks III has a nakedly emotional element that sets it apart.
The specter of death haunts this silly movie. It finds Dante still deep in mourning over the death of his wife Becky Scott (Rosario Dawson) and unborn child over a decade earlier. Like the similarly somber Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, Smith isn’t afraid to go big with heart-rending monologues and moments of heavy drama. The result is a movie that works best valentine from Smith to the adorably grungy world he has created in his films. Smith’s big old heart is in the right place, as always, but Clerks III isn’t a necessary follow-up so much as it is a rerun.
My Life’s in Turnaround (1993)
Before he found his life’s calling writing and directing movies where his character makes out with supermodels, Eric Schaeffer made his name co-writing, co-directing and starring in the autobiographical 1993 buddy movie My Life’s in Turnaround. Here Schaeffer’s cabbie romances Splick romances Rachel, a lawyer he meets cute when she comes to jail to represent him for bribing a cop who is gorgeous and successful and way out of his league but is played by Dana Wheeler-Nicholson, an actress who has not achieved considerable success in the world of high fashion.
Schaeffer and co-writer and co-director Donal Lardner Ward star as slacker protagonist Splick and Jason. They’re best friends who are otherwise a study in contrasts. One is a horny creep beautiful women find sexually irresistible. The other is a horny creep beautiful women find irresistible who also has facial hair.
Without a script or even an idea, these would-be players, who personify the overwhelming yet unearned confidence of mediocre white men, set out to make a movie.
With major The Emperor’s New Clothes energy the aspiring filmmakers take meetings with no script and no story but all the chutzpah in the world. It takes Splick and Jason forever to decide that they’ll follow in the footsteps of 99 percent of all low-budget independent filmmakers and make a movie based on their own lives.
Lardner and Schaeffer have a playful, goofy chemistry but My Life’s in Turnaround feels powered by the same arrogance that leads its character to think they deserve to make a movie despite ample evidence to the contrary.
In an unfortunately meta turn, a low-budget comedy about two men intent on making a movie despite having nothing to say is the work of two men intent on making a movie despite having nothing to say.
The Shadow of the Vampire (2000)
In the cheeky 2000 dark comedy Shadow of the Vampire an enigmatic figure played by an Oscar-nominated Willem Dafoe does not need to get into character to play a vampire in the 1921 German Expressionist masterpiece Nosferatu because he already is an undead, sunlight-hating blood-sucker. Dafoe’s bat and rat-like Max Schreck pretends to be an actor pretending to be a vampire because if his secret were to get out, it would, at the very least, make the film’s crew and the cast extremely uncomfortable. Nosferatu director F.W. Murnau knows all about his lead actor’s vampirism but foolishly thinks he can both control and exploit it.
Schreck is essentially an animal who cannot control his urges and compulsions. Murnau emerges as the real villain because he has the capacity for good yet chooses evil.
John Malkovich plays the legend of silent film as an amoral libertine willing to sacrifice multiple lives in the pursuit of great art. So he casts as his off-brand Count Dracula a real-life monster he tells the crew will never break character during filming.
The auteur and the ghoul have reached a Faustian bargain; Schreck will help Murnau make the most realistic vampire movie of all time and in return the director will let him feast merrily upon his cast and crew.
The performances here are uniformly excellent but the movie belongs to Dafoe. In Dafoe’s skilled hands Schreck is ancient, unholy and ravenous, a monster at once otherworldly and feral, even sub-human.
There’s no use being subtle or understated playing a silent screen actor. That’s doubly true when playing a silent screen actor who is also a real vampire. In a performance of great quantity as well as quality, a ferociously engaged Dafoe makes a profoundly silly premise sing. Shadow of the Vampire is a glorious lark about a movie world filled with monsters, parasites and vampires, of both the literal and figurative variety.
Stardust Memories (1980)
Woody Allen responded to criticism that he pretentiously ripped off Ingmar Bergman with 1978’s Interiors by ripping off Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 with 1980’s ragingly misanthropic Stardust Memories.
In a role he insists is not autobiographical because he is a goddamn liar, Woody Allen plays Sandy Bates, a horny comedian turned filmmaker who became rich and famous for his comedies but who wants to make serious art films.
Stardust Memories chronicles a headache-inducing nightmare of a weekend where Sandy is forced to confront his adoring public and gorgeous women who will not let him be at a celebration of his early, commercial comedies.
The universe wants Sandy to help humanity forget its troubles by sharing the gift of laughter but he has to follow his own prickly muse rather than the dreary wishes of the gargoyle-faced philistines demanding autographs and his precious time.
Everybody wants something from Sandy. Stardust Memories is a full-throated cry of comic revulsion towards the filmmaker’s admirers as well as his detractors. Allen seems equally disgusted by worshippers who hail him as a genius and critics unimpressed by his need to express himself as an artist and not just as a popular clown.
Stardust Memories is best understood as an unusually pure expression of its writer-director-star’s hatred for humanity and enduring fascination with the many beautiful, ethereal young women who become hopelessly obsessed with him sexually.
Allen spends much of the film romancing European beauties, most notably Charlotte Rampling as Dorrie, a mentally ill actress Sandy first spots as an extra in one of his films but who is bumped up to a leading role on the basis of his sexual attraction to her, and seemingly perfect French gamine Isobel (Marie-Christine Barrault). Thanks to Gordon Willis’ cinematography Stardust Memories looks great but it’s a curdled dark comedy with moments of beauty and grace but also an excess of ugliness and bile.
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