Winamp Wednesday: It's All Up to You
You could be better than you are...
Winamp Wednesday is our continuing feature spotlighting all the MP3s I downloaded in the wild-west days of the early internet. B-Sides, live shows, off-air recordings, classics, and today's track...
Bruce Willis and Danny Aiello, “Swingin’ on a Star”
This is mostly going to be about Hudson Hawk with not all that much nuance.
There’s a strange place in my heart for deeply imperfect films. I understand that Superman IV: The Quest for Peace is awful, but I’m supposed to not love a movie featuring another sincere Christopher Reeve performance and Sam Wanamaker turning the sleeze up to twenty? There are big and important films in world cinema’s lexicon that I’m sure are very well made, but you can’t sell a movie to me with “you’ll feel bad afterwards!” when I’ve just bought a bluray copy of New York Ninja. And I legitimately think Speed Racer is the best movie of the century thus far, and it’s not even particularly close.
So where does Hudson Hawk fit into this? It’s not a film that really knows what it wants to be. Bruce Willis was laboring under the auspices of being the next big thing after Moonlighting and the one-two punch of Die Hard and Die Hard but Terrible. In that mix he made The Vietnam Movie, No the Other One, the One with Hawk the Slayer in It and a pretty good cowboy movie and one of Hollywood’s true disasters. None of these features felt distinctly Bruce Willis. He was your wacky buddy who could still kick ass when needed, a little sensitive and a bit loving but so ready for a joke that he sometimes felt like an Uzi of punchlines. Nothing felt like the embodiment of his trademark smirk, not like his debut album Return of Bruno. Oh yeah, he cut an album during his time off from Moonlighting! What did that sound like?
Yikes. Oh, and a word to the stereotypes we now have of the 1980s: this is what most of it really looked like. Even as a small babychild I understood that shows usually looked more like Today’s Special than whatever neon puke goes into tribute bands and 80s Nights.
But The Return of Bruno reflected most of Bruce Willis’ obsessions, a checklist of really cool stuff that felt like Supermarket Sweep for late Baby Boomer Americanisms. Bruce got to sing with some of his idols and posture like a cool cat and sing about everything from relaxing on the Jersey Shore to being the world’s best secret agent. It’s a mess but it’s his mess, and I respect the hell out of it for that. So what was Hudson Hawk? It was posturing like a cool cat while doing a Supermarket Sweep through every trope he could think of. The problem is that his first choices weren’t available, so…
Let’s get James Bond! Will you take Derek Flint instead? We need a suave British villain! We got you Withnail. Hey, it would be great to sing along with Dean Martin. What about Danny Aiello in his place? Everything feels just slightly to the left of where it’s supposed to be. There’s a Stallone in this movie, and would you be surprised to find out that it’s Frank? It’s a comedy and it’s a heist movie and it’s a Bond movie and it’s a romance involving a nun. There’s a guy with a deadly hat but not the guy you’re thinking of.
But here’s the thing. The first twenty minutes of this movie are nitro, a flippant ridiculous little piece of filmmaking that comes from the director of Heathers taking on an action movie. The rest of the movie is intermittently fine, occasionally broken up by the fact that Bruce Willis doesn’t seem to want to be there. This was all your idea, Bruno! Catch the Hawk! But when it seems to be flagging here comes Richard E. Grant or Sandra Bernhard or David Caruso to do something completely insane. Hudson Hawk is a three-ring circus that contains several of the worst lines ever uttered in a major motion picture. It dares you to like it, loud and stupid and inappropriate, possibly completely contemptuous of the audience. No wonder it was a giant flop.
No wonder I love it to death.
“Swingin’ on a Star” encapsulates everything I love in this movie and what I really love about my favorite adventure pictures. This sequence is breezy and lightweight even when it’s slightly clever. Hawk and Tommy Five-Tone (yes, Tommy Five-Tone) are professionals but they’re not bothered by it. Why not keep time with old standards? It could feel offensively quirky, but Danny Aiello can sell anything. It’s a great sequence to me now, but when I was fifteen it felt cool as hell. Of course I needed this as an MP3. How am I supposed to do my homework or run any errand, no matter how small, without hyping myself up like these cat burglars?
Hudson Hawk isn’t good, at least not by normal metrics. But who needs normal metrics when you just enjoy something? I understand its failings, but sometimes things don’t need to be better than they are. After all, we could be swingin’ on a star…