Category Archives: James Woods

Fast Walking: James Woods and how to do sleaze

Posted on June 21, 2011 by Andrew Nette| 7 Comments

Ever since I posted on the underrated movie Cop a few months ago, I’ve been engaged in my own James Woods film festival.

As I wrote at the time, Cop is a great little neo noir that combines the rogue cop, police procedural and serial killer genres. But it works so well due to the casting of James Woods as the central character of Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins, a sleazy burnt out LAPD homicide dick trying to track down a maniac no one else thinks exists.

Watching and re-watching Wood’s films only confirms his status as the original hard-boiled bad lieutenant. With his whippet thin body and bedroom eyes, his looks are more lounge lizard than movie star perfect. And his permanently up turned lip and slightly bad skin make him look like a man with a bad past.

Starting with The Onion Field (1979), in which he played a disturbed ex-con who panics one night when he and his partner are pulled over by cops and murders one of them, Woods went on to play some of the most repellent yet strangely charismatic sleazes on film.

Videodrome (1983): This early Cronenberg effort hasn’t dated in the slightest and Woods’ is in top form as sleazy soft porn cable TV producer, Max Renn.… Read more

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Posted in 1970s American crime films, 1980s American crime films, Crime film, James Woods

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Cop: is it the best movie ever made of a James Ellroy novel?

Posted on March 23, 2011 by Andrew Nette| 1 Comment

CopI’m going to go way out on a limb here, and say that in my opinion the relatively unknown movie Cop may just be the best adaptation of a James Ellroy book to hit the screen.

When I opened my recent review of the 1988 film Cop for Back Alley Noir’s Film Noir of the Week with that statement the response was interesting.

Some disagreed with the merits of my choice. Others felt the need to refer back to what the man himself, Ellroy, had said about the merits of the movies made of his books.

I did a quick search on what Ellroy has said on the subject before submitting the review. There’s a lot of contradictory quotes out there. Whether this is because he’s changed his mind a lot or he’s out for a headline, well, I’ll let you all be the judge of that.

For me, the debate raised the interesting question of what value we should give to the opinion of an artist in one area (writing), when their work is translated into another (film).

I am a huge Ellroy fan and I think Cop works as a movie precisely because the book is not a dense, labyrinthine crime epic in the vein of LA Confidential and the Black Dahlia (both of which failed, Black Dahlia much more so, in the almost Herculean task of transposing Ellroy’s words onto the screen).… Read more

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Posted in 1980s American crime films, Charles Durning, James Ellroy, James Woods, Neo Noir

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