Currently Watching #1
Spader! Spader! Spader!
Hi, friends,
So, as mentioned in my most recent Week in Media round-up, I’ve been working my way through the Criterion Channel’s Erotic Thrillers collection. Woo boy and also good lord. What a blast.
Buuuut, true to form, I got a little distracted and have taken a minor detour back into James Spaderville, which basically happens whenever I watch anything featuring James Spader? It blows my mind that—particularly in his early years—he whipsaws between roles where he plays nice-guy-wimps and utterly deranged villains.
That said, even when he’s playing nice-guy-wimps, there are FLASHES of DANGER SPADER? Like, you never know if he’s going to snap? And I love that so much of his acting toolkit involves subtle physicality, simple-but-very-real things like clenching his jaw when his character is angry-but-staying-quiet, certain tension in how he holds himself, inability to stay completely still when his character is uncomfortable.
Weep for Josh, my co-worker, and my patrons: I have not shut up about this for days.
Dream Lover
Nicholas Kazan, 1993
This is the one that started it: James Spader is a recently divorced walking collection of red flags who runs into Mädchen Amick, who is also a walking collection of red flags. They proceed to have a LOT of sex—they are both stupidly beautiful in this movie and have excellent chemistry, I said in my Letterboxd log that you could basically feel the Quivering Loins™ just off-screen—and she tells him all about her Tragic Backstory™.
Before you know it, they’re getting married and suddenly it’s a few years later and they have a kid… and then things start getting weird. Spader starts noticing discrepancies in her story and starts getting suspicious about… well, everything, and my goodness, both of them Make Some Choices.
There are some seriously retrograde vibes about relationships and gender and so on—a Letterboxd reviewer said something along the lines of “if a men’s rights activist made a Lifetime movie, this would be the result”—and I don’t think they’re wrong. Some of the script is objectively bad—like, pulpy is one thing, but there is some dialogue here that is so terrible that I think the reason it ultimately worked for us is that the two of them are so ridiculously charismatic. The fact that it’s currently streaming on Criterion AND on Tubi kind of says it all?
All that SAID, we both found it bizarrely riveting—again, largely because of the two lead performances. Spader for sure, but even more so because of Amick. She’s done a lot of character work in lots of one-off episodes of procedurals and whatnot, but we mostly know her as Shelly Johnson from Twin Peaks—after the movie was over, one of us turned to the other and said, “I genuinely had no idea that she had that in her.” And then we had a lengthy discussion about how much we’d LOVE to see her character in this absolutely DESTROY Leo, her horrible abusive husband in Twin Peaks.
Bad Influence
Curtis Hanson, 1990
Oh my god. This movie.
Where to even begin.
James Spader is an up-and-coming financial analyst—HIS BOSS IS JOHN DE LANCIE, AKA STAR TREK’S Q, hahaha—who finds it impossible to stand up for himself at work and is stressed out about being engaged to Marcia Cross. He has a bad day, ends up in a bar, almost gets beat up by some dude…
ENTER ROB LOWE TO THE RESCUE WITH A CLASSIC BEER BOTTLE SMASH.
But then he pretty much disappears, and Spader doesn’t even get the chance to thank him, let alone ask his name. Strangely, though, his wallet has gone missing. SO WEIRD, I WONDER WHAT HAPPENED TO IT.
Some time later, he’s out for a nighttime jog and runs into Rob Lowe, who pulls him into a world of Underground Clubs and Anonymous Sex and, later, getting completely blitzed and knocking over burger joints? Rob Lowe teaches James Spader about Standing Up For Himself and Taking What He Wants… but eventually things go too far, Spader tries to end the relationship, and then Lowe turns on him.
Things reach a point where Spader feels forced to dump a dead body—a woman that Lowe murdered—in the tar pits, and she almost IMMEDIATELY gets found, because A) he’s not a criminal mastermind and B) I’d assume that Lowe tipped off the police because he’s just full-tilt torturing Spader at this point, and it results in this moment, which, in my opinion, is truly CINEMA GOLD and also points to Lowe’s future comedy work:
Anyway, it’s supremely pulpy, both in terms of storyline and visuals. Example: At one point Rob Lowe is making out with a lady in Spader’s apartment, between two windows, BOTH of them throwing Classic Noir Venetian Blind Shadows™ all over them, and it’s just so over-the-top that I laughed out loud with delight.
As I noted in my Letterboxd review, if it had been made today, they totally would have made out. A LOT.
Random: David Duchovny is listed in the credits as ‘Clue Goer with Glasses’, but sadly I didn’t spot him. Also you see Rob Lowe’s butt.
Thanks for indulging me in my weird love of James Spader.
Talk soon,
Leila
Great, now I have to watch these. 😆 (I think maybe I have seen Bad Influence before but can't remember it?) There is just Something About Spader.
I just love that the decades (at least for me) are so easily encompassed by individual actors. Mid-70's TV? Richard Hatch. Mid 80's? The inescapable Heather Locklear. And for movies in the early 90's?? Rob Lowe, and James Spader were freakin' everywhere. It's so weird, I think that they really figured that Spader was like a middle of the road every man because he had medium brown hair and a medium tall body and... He was just "medium." And Yet...
I'm so glad to remember his movies! Not sure how I had forgotten about him. (Well, not gonna to lie, it's mainly because I try to block out the 80s in their entirety.) Spader really did do Unhinged and Wimpy with equally believable intensity. (Or perhaps those two words are just good earmarks for the entire decade...😬😂)