Peter Falk: My Fave Five

 "A good costume is half the battle".

-Peter Falk (1927-2011)

in Wings of Desire

5. Made (2001)

Long before Iron Man and Cowboys and Aliens, actor/director Jon Favreau was known for his smaller, character driven movies like Swingers and Made.

In Made, Peter Falk plays Max, a low level gangster who entrusts doofus small time boxer Vince Vaughn to handle one of his money laundering schemes.

Made is a quirky, somewhat edgy comedy. "Swingers meets The Sopranos" is how one review put it. Falk's performance is just menacing enough to be believable as the threatening heavy of the story. At the same time, he is also just funny enough so as not to break the comic momentum of the film. That balance between humour and drama is one of Falk's great strengths as an actor.








4. The In-Laws (1979)

The In-Laws is Peter Falk's best comic role. Allan Aarkin plays a dentist whose daughter is about to marry Peter Falk's son.

Just before the wedding, Falk shows up with a bunch of counterfeit bills and a story that he works for the CIA. It's not long before Falk drags Aarkin off on a dubious yet dangerous mission to Central America.

The In-Laws nicely showcases Falk's comedic range. Falk's charm and humour are front and center. It also helps that he and Aarkin have incredible on-screen comic chemistry.

The 1979 In-Laws is not in anyway to ever be confused with the far inferior 2003 remake starring Michael Douglas and Albert Brooks.




Other stand out comedic performances by Falk include the only once aired made-for-TV remake of Neil Simon's The Sunshine Boys, co-starring Woody Allen and, of course, Falk's great cameo in The Great Muppet Caper.





3. The Brinks Job (1978)

The Brink's Job is an entertaining little heist movie (based on a true story). Taking place mainly in 1950, it tells the tale of how a few very small time criminals managed to pull off what was at that time the biggest roberry in US history. They were helped in no small part by Brink's' amazingly lax security standards at their Boston office in 1950. 4 million dollars total was stolen. Only 50,000 was ever recovered.

Falk is a wonderful part of an ensemble of top notch actors including Peter Boyle, Paul Sorvino, Warren Oates and Sheldon Leonard.












Who knew Mr.Falk was such a Fanboy?



2. Columbo (1971-2003)

The role of Lt. Columbo was not originally offered to Falk.  The lead in the series of made-for-TV movies (Columbo aired in rotation with McMillan and Wife and McCloud as part of the NBC Mystery Movies) was first offered to a few different actors, including crooner and Bob Hope sidekick Bing Crosby.  Crosby turned down the role, reportedly because he felt the series would interfere with his golf game a little too much. Every struggling actor who just read that last sentence is now cringing I'm sure.

When Falk was finally offered the part, he contributed a great deal to the role. One of his most notable contributions was the raincoat. It was actually his own raincoat. Falk would also often ad-lib lines and physical quirks. Not only did his ad-libs help flesh out the character but they would also keep his fellow actors on edge. This played rather well for the scenes as his co-stars were mainly playing murder suspects.

Speaking of ad-libbing and improvisation, Falk's performance as Columbo is one of the most brilliant status shifting performances I have ever seen. For those of you who have never been to one of my improv workshops, status is a way of defining the power and presence that a character has in a given scene. Status can be played high or low. For instance, in a scene with a spoiled child getting all the ice cream he wants from his dad, the child his high status and the dad is low status.  It's all about attitude, really. Falk had this wonderful way of playing Columbo as seemingly low status. Once the murder suspect thinks that Columbo is a bumbling idiot, they let their guard down. Columbo is then able to get more information out the suspects than he might by attempting a more high status means of interrogation. Falk's Columbo would play low status as a means of attaining high status. The murder suspect (often played by celebrity guest stars) only thinks they have a higher status than Columbo. In reality, they are, in fact, the low status players in the scene. Trust me, with 21 years of improv experience under my belt, playing those kinds of subtle status shifts ain't no easy thing.

Mr. Falk truly earned every one of those four Emmy's he won for the role of  Lt. Columbo.






1. Wings of Desire (1987)

Wings of Desire is not only Falk's best performance but one of the best films ever made. A half black-and-white Wim Wenders film about fallen angels in German with English subtitles is the last place you'd ever expect Columbo to turn up. That is the strength of his performance in the film.

Falk's very presence in Wings of Desire is a stroke of brilliance on Wenders' part. Not only does Mr.Falk turn in the best performance of his career but he (playing himself, no less) is also invaluable to the film as a whole. Falk's  persona brings an earthy charm and humour to a film that, while quite amazing in its own right, would otherwise lack those qualities. A very familiar English-speaking face also no doubt did not hurt Wings of Desires' US box office numbers.

In Wings of Desire, Falk delivers my favorite line ever about acting: "A good costume is half the battle".

Much of Falk's dialogue, like much of the film's dialogue, was ad-libbed and improvised on set (not unlike Columbo, in that sense). The scene where Falk tries on many different hats for his role in the film within the film was inspired by Falk's actual wardrobe fitting. At his fitting, he went through hats just like he does in the scene. At the end of the fitting, Wenders said, "Well, I don't know if we have a found a hat but we have found a scene".



I guess he is no longer a fallen angel.

RIP Peter Falk

Weekly Goofy Movie Clip "William Shatner vs. Rush Limbaugh"

Here it is folks: The Grudge Match.

It's William Shatner vs Rush Limbaugh.

This is a segment from the talk show William Shatner's Raw Nerve 

A rare overtly political moment for Mr.Shatner and a rare overtly reasonable moment for Mr. Limbaugh....well, for a bit anyway.





Bill's expression at 1:31 is priceless.

Well, at least he made the Rush laugh.

Stay tuned for another Weekly Goofy Movie Clip next week.

Same Bat Time...ish.

Same Bat Blog

Having on of a Hat Returns Next Week

The Montreal Fringe Festival has turned out to be 1000% more demanding and crazier that I expected it to be.

"He Had on a Hat" will return next week at its regularly schedluled time.

In the meantime, we are just four days away from the 1st day of Summer.

So why not chill like these guys?

Back next week, with quite possibly, a Fringe postmortem...or something equally interesting.

Until then....

My Years on the Fringe

On The Spot Improv's  HORRIFIC HISTORICAL HYSTERICAL Improv Walking Tour kicks off tonight at the Fringe Park at 7 PM. That means, among others things,  that I will be performing in the in Montreal Fringe Festival once again.


Like a lot of Montreal based actors, comedians, musicians, dancers and performance artists of all kinds, I have had a long and varied history with the Fringe. I suspect my history (while not necessarily as varied) is most likely the longest of anyone performing is this year's fest.

I was in the very first Fringe Festival in Montreal. I had heard the legends of other Canadian Fringe Festivals like Edmonton as well as those of the great Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland. 

On The Spot Improv was only about a year old when the first Fringe Festival in this city launched in June of 1991. We did your basic short form theatresports improv show. We were performing in one of three (yes, three) venues running that year. The venue was a little room upstaris from a Hungarian restaurant on St. Laurent between Sherbrooke and Prince Arthur, as I recall. Csarda, I think it was called.  All I remember is that we got good sized audiences, the beer tent was tiny (I've gone camping in bigger tents) and it rained a lot.


I was back in the Fringe again in '92. Once again, I was performing with On The Spot Improv. Now two years old, we all had our improv chops down to a fine art by this point. 

Or so it seemed at the time. 

This time around we presented, in alternate performances, our improvised versions of a horror movie, a film noire and a fairly tale. It was another show that I remember doing very well.

There was also a moment in one of the improvised Fairy Tale shows that will stay with me forever. I forget the exact details and mechanics of the scene now but I do recall that in each improvised fairy tale we would get a suggestion of an object from the audience. That object would end up being the undoing of the villain of the story. I remember one show the object in question was a cigarette. So, toward the end of the show, the hero gave the villain (some kind of evil magical fish man if I remember correctly) a cigarette. I was playing the narrator that show. As soon as the evil magical fish man started smoking the cigarette, I called out, "Forty years later!". The actor playing the evil magical fish man caught my drift immediately and proceeded to play out this wonderful death scene where the evil magical fish man finally succumbed to a 40 year long battle with lung cancer.  I was later told after the show (by some fellow members of the troupe at the time, who shall remain nameless) that I had "destroyed the genre" and that it would have been a much better show if the evil magical fish man would have died from smoke getting into his gills or "something more immediate". Friends of mine who saw the exact same show told me that the "40 years later" line was "brilliant" and that it "made the show". 

Ah, such is the lot of the improviser.

I attended many Fringes in the years that followed. I saw some brilliant shows. The Canadian clown team of Mump and Schmoot stands out in particular. I also saw some shows that were, well, not quite as brilliant. A play from the '93 Fringe entitled Batman and Robin: The Untold Story, regrettably, still sticks out in my mind (and, yes, you can guess in about 30 seconds what the "untold' part of the story is). 

I also performed at the grand daddy of all fringes, The Edinburgh Fringe Festival, in 1995.  I appeared that year at the world's longest running Fringe Festival with The Vestibules. 

As opposed to the first Montreal Fringe Festival with 3 venues, Edinburgh that year had 189 venues. Every play you'd ever heard of,  from King Lear to Annie Get Your Gun to No Exit and everything in between, was playing in Edinburgh that year. I think the play I wrote in high school was on in Venue 57.


Two years later, again with The Vestibules, I also did the grand daddy of all Canadian Fringes, the Edmonton Fringe Festival. Edmonton's Fringe Festival is more on the scale of Montreal's Jazz Festival.  The Fringe atmosphere is very strong in that city. I remember getting on a bus. I still happened to be wearing my Festival Performer's pass at the time. Much to my amazement, the driver stopped me from paying my fare and told me I could ride for free. I rode the bus for free for the entire run of the festival, just because I was a Fringe performer. I recall my dad telling me similar stories when he was wearing his Royal Canadian Air Force uniform during World War II. Those two things are exactly the same thing in every way.

I returned as a performer to the Montreal Fringe in the year 2000. This time I was all on my lonesome. I wrote and performed my own one man show entitled "Being Terence Bowman". The critical reaction was "mixed". However, I  did have some really good audiences, including one show that sold out (not always an easy feat at the Montreal Fringe).

I was back in the Montreal Fringe in 2006. The show was called "Terence Bowman's Happy Fun Fringe Show!!!". It was a more comedy-oriented one man show than my previous one had been. I had a good first couple of shows with good attendance and positive audience reactions. All that came to a crashing halt when the most brutally negative review of my entire career was published. That review pretty much turned the rest of my run into open dress rehearsals, each with 1 or 2 exclusive selected invitees in attendance.

Ah, such is the lot of a Fringe performer.

 

Happily, 2006 did not turn out to be my Fringe swan song. 

I'm back this year with a new, fun and different improv show.  21 years after appearing in the first fringe festival ever, On The Spot Improv and I are back with The HORRIFIC HISTORICAL HYSTERICAL Improv Walking Tour. There is no theatre for this show. The streets and parks of Montreal are our venue. The show is a walking tour that explores the life, death and afterlife of an obscure figure from the history of Montreal. This local historical figure is so obscure, in fact, that it's almost as if the audience just invented them moments before the show began.

Don't forget this show too

If last night's free preview show is anything to go by,  The HORRIFIC HISTORICAL HYSTERICAL Improv Walking Tour is gonna be both unique and fun.


I will be try and blog regularly on the latest news from our improv walking tours, other shows I may see and the Fringe experience in general.


Stay tuned.

Weekly Goofy Movie Clip "Lamest DVD Audio Commentary Ever"

DVD audio commentaries are a mixed bag.

Some commentaries are brilliant and insightful. Some merely give you a few interesting anecdotes and trivia about the movie. Some are just redundant descriptions of the onscreen action. Some are weird comments bordering on rants that have little or nothing to do with the scene or the movie. Some are major movie fanboy geekout fests by "film historians" or "movie experts" (check out the DVD commentaries on the early Sean Connery James Bond Movies or the 1930's Universal Studios Classic Monster Horror Movies)

Some, I'm sorry to say, are just plain lame. Some of the lamest include:

Conan the Barbarian (1982)

Arnold Schwarzenegger (as we see Conan pick up his sword): "...and this is the sword I used in the movie."

Logan's Run (1976)

Michael York (as multiple special effects and miniature shots fly by on the screen): "...then, after graduating from Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, I began appearing regularly at the Old Vic Theatre in London..."

Batman: The Movie (1966)

Adam West (as Batman and Robin are running and jumping into the Batboat): "Do you remember doing that?"

Burt Ward (Robin): "Nah. Don't remember doin' that at all".

Though the commentary track that takes the proverbial lame cake has got to be this little gem. Lance Henriksen, an actor whose work is quite respectable in The Terminator, Aliens, Near Dark, and the TV series, Millennium, was not so respectable when he made this commentary for a scene from the first Alien vs. Predator movie.

The first voice you hear is that of director Paul W.S.Anderson. You can also hear co-star Sanaa Lathan on the track.

Seriously guys? You really couldn't do another take? Not even during that scene? 

What did they? Only have Mr.Henrikson on contract for the exact running time of the movie?

I love how Mr.Anderson's and Ms.Lathan's nervous laughter and attempts to be casual about the whole affair just make it all the more awkward.

Does anybody give a damn at all about the people out there who lay down good hard earned cash for a DVD with special features and then get that?

Now you can get it in Hi-Def!

Check back here every week for another Weekly Goofy Movie Clip.


Same Bat Time...ish.

Same Bat Blog

RIP The Video Store 1977-2012

May 29, 2011. A crappy rainy Sunday.

I show up at my local Blockbuster to return a couple of Blu-rays I had rented last week. The rain and the wind are drizzling in my face so I keep my head down until I am well into the store.

As I walk in, I'm debating whether I should look around for something else to rent or just take a quick look at the sales in the "previously enjoyed"  section.

Just as I drop my movies into the return slot, I realize something is up. I have not heard the mandatory happy "Bonjour! Hi!" greeting from even one Blockbuster employee. 

I look around the store. Holy crap. There's lots of people here. 

I think about that for a second. Well, it is raining and often the video stores do get busy when it rains. No. No. Wait a sec. What is this? 1983?

As I look at the multitude of unusually empty shelves, the situation becomes glaringly obvious. The rumors of imminent Blockbuster store closings have come to pass. The giant that had stumbled and fallen some time ago is now breathing his last breathe.

Suddenly, the obsessive compulsive movie collector part of my brain takes control. I immediately head to the Blu-ray section. 

How long has this liquidation sale been going on? Will any decent movies still be left?

At the same time, in the back of my mind, the historical significance of the moment is not lost on me. The video store, as we know it, is facing its Armageddon (oh, I got plenty more metaphors like that coming, my friends).

We're not just talking the dying Blockbuster giant either. Another smaller independent video store near my home has not stocked a new release in like three months. Another one nearby simply does not stock Blu-ray discs. Another is continually liquidating a large part of their inventory.

The video store will soon join vinyl records, Steinberg's, a divided Germany, the slide ruler, Miracle Mart and the Soviet Union as established institutions that I have seen disappear in my lifetime. However, unlike all those other things, I have also witnessed the birth of the video store.

Check out the channel dials on this baby

First hand.

My first job ever  was in a video store (well, if you don't count delivering papers for The Montreal Star for a week before they shut down forever). I worked in the very first video store on the suburban West Island of Montreal, in fact. 

I started working there in 1981. The place could not have been open more than a year. The entire concept of the video store was not even five years old at the time.

The first commercially available video recorders dated back as far as 1963. However, the first truly commercially viable VCR's and accompanying tapes, first appeared around 1976. I remember there was this big article in Playboy magazine (see? even back then I was reading it for the articles) with a picture of one those big clunky 70's VCR's in front of the 70's version of King Kong with the banner title of "Johnny Carson Watch Your Ass". The article predicted that these new cool video machines were going to put an irreversible dent into conventional TV viewing.

Uh-huh. Yeah. Right. Got any other brilliant predictions there, guys?

The original idea of the VCR was that it would be used pretty much exclusively for what we now in the PVR age call "timeshifting". You'd be able to record TV shows that you weren't actually able to watch on TV  when they aired. Speaking as a kid who, on account of his bed time, was only able to watch the first half of every James Bond movie, believe me, this was a truly revolutionary concept.

The idea of watching prerecorded tapes of previously theatrically released movies was not on anybody's radar. What a ridiculous waste of state of the art tech that would be! Besides the concept had already been tried and failed, miserably, back in 1972 (along with an equally unsuccessful early VCR).


This a Sony VCR commercial from 1977. Note the only feature they're pushing is recording.

I remember seeing this ad on TV when it first aired. The reaction of those cab drivers is really not that out there.

Circa 1976, there was this small company known as Magnetic Video who had been in business-doing something or other- since 1968. These guys went to 20th Century Fox studios and asked for a licensing deal to put one or more of the studio's films on a videocassette and sell it. The reported response from Fox was "Um, yeah. whatever. Here we'll give you...um...I dunno...umm...how about the movie version of M*A*S*H...for...ah...I dunno...just give us...like...$10,000 for the rights, okay?".

By 1977, Magnetic Video had 50 different movie titles available for sale on Betamax cassette as well as on the much lesser upstart video format known as VHS. A Los Angeles based entrepreneur named George Atkinson opened up the first store front video rental outlet in December of that year. Having blown all his capital buying 100 movies on video (reportedly about 25 bucks a pop in 1977), Atkinson hit on the idea of an annual "membership fee" of $50 in addition to the cassette rental fee of $10 a day. This video stuff was still just for the rich folk.

In a response not unlike the industry's response to the recent issue of video downloads, Atkinson was threatened with a major lawsuit for renting the videos. The lawsuit lasted until one of the high priced lawyers working for the big Hollywood studios discovered that, yes, in fact, actually, renting the tapes is completely legal under US copyright laws.

Thus the way was paved for my first job.

So 4 years later I'm working at one of the first video rental stores in the city, possibly the country. Videologue is the name of the store. It was the the one and only store of its kind for for miles and miles around.

The place was tiny. The store's first location did not even have a proper store front. We were located in rented office space in and amongst a bunch of actual business offices upstairs from an itsy bitsy mall. That did not slow down business in any way.

The news of the store spread far and wide. Early technology adapters came from all over. Such luminaries as the host of the CTV game show, The Mad Dash, Pierre Lalonde, and the lead singer of Canadian 70's arena rock back, April Wine, Miles Goodwyn, frequented the store. It was the video store to see and be seen in.

We were in on the ground floor of the 80's video boom. By 1982, there were any number of other video stores in the neighborhood. Some of them even had store fronts.

Once Videologue did finally moved to a store front location, it was not uncommon to have people (especially older folk), walk in off the street and ask, "What kind of a store is this?".

And, yes, back then, the store would get very busy every time it rained.

In my time working at Videologue, I experienced many of the significant milestones in the history of the video rental industry. For instance, I remember listening to all our techno geek customers complaining endlessly about how the crappy VHS cassettes completely took over the video market from the clearly far superior Betamax system.

We also sold VCR's. The place went nuts when we started stocking the first ever VCR to fall below $800...in 1982 dollars.

Walmart now sells a DVD player for $20

In 1983, Paramount Home Video sent us an endless amount of promotional posters for the upcoming home video release of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The studio was using one of their hottest properties to take the "massive gamble" (as all the fairly new home video trades at the time called it) of marketing movies on VHS at the consumer friendly price of just $19.95. Up till then movies on video cassette were priced primarily for video rental stores and not for general retail sale. Some movies cost as much as $110 a tape. Only the super rich uber movie geeks actually bought movies in those days. We sold more big screen projection TV's than we did movies.

So Paramount Home Video was banking on the fact that, in addition of rental revenues, even more money could be made off of movie sales, as long as the the price was right. Anyone who buys videos today, knows which way their "massive gamble" went (come to think of it, given the nature of Trek fandom, it wasn't really that big a gamble at all).

The big VHS marketing experiment as it appeared in 1983

Industry milestone, yes. Good movie,not really.

Another seminal 80's movie was Conan the Barbarian. Sorry, Arnie fans (those of you that are still left) I'm only talkin' industry terms here. I remember the trades being all a buzz about how this Conan movie had the unique virtue of being the first film to make more money on video than in its intial theatrical release. It was not long till there was suddenly movies like The Sword and the Sorcerer, The Beastmaster, Barbarian Queen and other low budget muscles, babes and bad dialogue epics filled our shelves.

Then there were the movies.

Just like today in video stores, movies play on TV's in the store. They play, ostensibly to promote the store's product, but, in practice those movies are more to keep the employees from getting bored when things are slow.

Bingo for me too!

I got to see so many movies while working at Videologue. Well, when it wasn't raining, anyway.

At the time of the initial home video release of the original Star Wars, for instance, the movie played in our store on a seemingly constant endless loop for the entire summer of '82. Almost all of the Star Wars lines and references I know today were picked up during those screenings (BTW, it did say "Episode IV: A New Hope" on the screen even then....but Han Solo still fired first).

In addition to Star Wars, I got to catch up with many other movies. I'd watch films that I liked the first time around in the theatre, had not seen yet, missed, didn't get around to or just wasn't all that interested in to begin with. The ones that stick out in my mind are are Flashdance, Forbidden Planet, An Officer and a Gentleman, Fantastic Voyage, Ragtime, Flash Gordon, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Body Heat, The Longest Day, Annie Hall, The Great Muppet Caper, Alien,The African Queen, Airplane!, The Thing [Blu-ray] and (my boss's fave,sadly) Porky's .

Most importantly, though, I finally saw the final half of all those James Bond movies.

It was year before I got to see how Bond took this guy out.

I worked at Videologue until 1984. I was laid off when business started getting just a little bit too slow. By then, chain video stores were muscling out most of the small mom and pop outfits like ours (though, the chains then were still mostly regional then). Videologue was struggling. A license to print money transformed into a tough and highly competitive business in just three years. The store was just not able to keep up with the growing competition from chains with much more resources at their disposal. Videologue went out of business not long after I left.

Fgiggin' amazing job while it lasted, though.

After that, I moved off the West Island and into the Montreal borough known as NDG (my hood ever since).

My first week in the 'DG, I landed a job at Avenue Video on Monkland ave. That store is still there. If there is anyone from Avenue Video reading this, I would just like to point out that your sign is wrong. It reads "Avenue Video. Since 1986". I worked there in 1984.

That job did not last long. Turns out they didn't actually need to hire another employee when they hired me (huh?) so I was let go after three weeks.

From there on in, I was a purely a spectator and customer of the video industry.

The industry continued to boom. The gap between video release and theatrical release and video release got shorter. It went from what was often years to matter of months. That was largely thanks to these guys....

The giant US and Canadian corporate Blockbuster video chain moved in the 90's.  Many of the smaller stores and chains still held in there, nonetheless.

Around the year 2000, the first nail hit the coffin of the video rental industry.  The home video digital format had been a long time coming. The public immediately embraced the medium of the DVD.  So much so that many DVD sales of catalog films (as they say in the biz) would often out-gross the theatrical box office revenues of current movies.

Video stores had to keep up. In the space of just five years, almost all their inventory had to repurchased in the DVD format. Some of those stores had thousands of titles. Even with the popularity of the format, that still must have meant some serious financial demands on the stores. Then the whole process started happening again a few years later with the Blu-ray format.

Then the good ol' Internet mucked everything up. Just as the VCR put an irreversible dent in conventional TV watching 25 years earlier, the Internet put an irreversible dent in conventional video viewing in the first decade of the 21st century. Zip.ca, Netflix, both legal and illegal digital downloads presented competition that the video rental store could just not match. Blockbuster attempted their own version of Zip and Netflix but, alas, it was far too late.

The video store industry is now on life support. It just lost a major organ with the demise of Blockbuster. Some higher brain functions may still stay in place for some time to come. For instance, stores like Montreal's own Boit Noire, that cater to a clientele of niche cinephiles, could still last a few years longer.

Overall, though, I predict the video rental store will last until next year, 2012. I only say that so that the industry's dates, 1977-2012, make a nice even 35 years.

In these days of slow work in my chosen field, I often find myself toying with the idea of getting a job in a video store once again. It would be fascinating to be in on the death of the industry just as I was in on its birth.

And, oh, yeah, for those of you still keeping track, last Sunday I picked up the Blu-ray disc editions of Casino Royale , I Am Legend , The Terminator and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull  for a combined total of about 21 bucks.

The death of the video store industry is bittersweet indeed.

I got this disc home and watched the first half of the movie before going to bed, just for old time's sake