the guiltiest pleasure stuffed into the back of the closet

My friend Jeff likes to challenge people with what he calls "hypotheticals"... like: "Would you rather have everything you eat taste like chalk for the next seven years or lose a foot?" That kind of thing. Awhile back he set this before me: would I rather remain passionate about films but have truly hideous taste, or have fine taste but lose much of the passion?

It's the easiest he's ever posed, no question, because who'd give up the passion? In the end, it doesn't really matter if it's Roland Emmerich or Kurosawa or reruns of Lost In Space that get you up and jumping, as long as you're up and jumping. And, let's face it, even the most discerning critical mind has goofy blind spots. EVERYONE has a guilty love, a really incomprehensible crush on some bad film, a crush that can go on for a lifetime but generally stays shoved back into the dusty corners.

I once knew a guy, a sort of intellectual snob with a powerful fear of anything that smacked of metaphysics, who sent me home with his copy of Meet Joe Black, handing it over with the kind of serious look that says, "This film changed my life, so be careful what you say about it." I once knew a guy whose favorite film was the American remake of Cousin, Cousine, the one with Ted Danson and Isabella Rosellini. He watched it, he said, once a month and had for years, and planned to keep doing it. I've never seen it; I understand that it might be one of the forgotten greats, but you understand my skepticism. He was vague when I asked him why he loved it, and that's as it should be, because with the Incomprehensible Crush on the Mediocre Film, the real motive behind the love is so subjective as to be all but inexpressible. Something in the film reaches down and touches some important, little-touched place so deep inside us it rarely sees the rational light of the everyday world, and so watching the film becomes a sort of sacred ritual, a paying homage to that shadowed place.

Any reader who's been paying attention will know that my tombstone will never read SHE HAD VERY FINE TASTE, but if I was to dig down to the back of the closet and pull out the film (two films, actually... there was a sequel!) that I probably watch more frequently than any other, I'd come up with my old scratchy copies of the Young Guns movies.



Yup. I swear to God, there are so many things to love. First off, they're peopled by the likes of Terry O'Quinn, Viggo Mortensen, Terence Stamp, Robert Knepper, Jenny Wright, Leon Rippy, Scott Wilson, Jack Kehoe, Tracey Walter, Brian Keith, an absolute dream supporting cast. The Guns themselves are hit and miss: Kiefer Sutherland, for instance, ranges from wonderful to the truly execrable, but the joy of modern technology is that you fast-forward through, say, Sutherland's whole romance with the "China Doll" in the first film and enjoy instead the way he mounts a horse in the second, with that same kind of anti-gravitational ease that Kirk Douglas used in the War Wagon, or the way he lovingly puts away his book and takes up his gun in the first, wordlessly saying goodbye to his old life. Similarly, Lou Diamond Phillips weaves wildly back and forth between the sublime and the ridiculous. It's the nature, I suspect, of the Young Guns beast.

The first movie came out in 1988 and took in $44 million at the box office. The second one came a few years later and I assume took in even more, if only because the first one had terrible music and the second had a fantasy-provoking, epic score by Alan Silvestri and a whole CD full of gun ballads by...



Yes. Jon Bon Jovi. "Blaze of Glory" is unquestionably one of the great butt-rock ballads of all time. "Lord I never drew first / But I drew first blood / I'm the devil's son / Call me young gun." You think I got those lyrics online, but I didn't have to, because I own the CD. The liner notes fold out into a pouty poster of the old-style, long-haired JBJ. (And don't say my generation never gave you anything. We gave you BUTT-ROCK, my friend. Motley Crue. Warrant. Faster Pussycat. Guns 'n' Roses. Or you could look at it this way: we gave you butt-rock, and then we gave you Barack Obama to make up for it a little.)

The second movie is better than the first, and you don't have to watch the first to enjoy the second, but if you can survive the cringe-inducing bits (any mention of the word "pals", the aforementioned China Doll subplot, any talk of Doc's poetry, Chavez's jeremiad about the genocide of his people, any scene with Jack Palance in it, to mention just a few examples), there are things in the first that are quite wonderful. Emilio Estevez is supremely graceful in balancing the charm, fearlessness, loyalty, childish glee, selfishness and sudden violence of the psychopathic Billy, a boy who giggles over his murders and forms his Billy-the-Kid persona from bits he reads in the newspapers. It's in the second that the more mature Billy gets his Gun-Pointing Catchword: you know, like Arnold with "hasta la vista, baby," or Clint with "go ahead; make my day." Billy's, -- and it's wonderfully effective the way he speaks it, -- is "I'll make you famous."

As far as other Guns go, Alan Ruck gives a small, gentle, and textured performance as a farmer who loses his land and joins up with the gang to find some new lease on life. Years before he went to work for David Lynch, Balthasar Getty is lovely as a twitchy little orphan who finds a home amongst the outlaws until the lawmen cut short his wayward life, and Dermot Mulroney is no-questions, full-stop, hands-down brilliant in the first movie as Dirt-Faced Steve. In the context of a sort of Teen Idol sigh-fest (I confess, I confess, it is partly that), Mulroney gives as unabashedly an anti-glamorous performance as you can get, and it has not one weak moment. His face obscured by constant filth and his lip so stuffed with chaw his visage seems malformed, Dirt-Faced Steve is a simple-minded bigot with a heart of gold and Mulroney surpasses the quality of the script in creating him.

And the quality of both scripts is hit-and-miss, to say the least. In the space of five minutes the words veer between genius and dungheap. The simple poetry of a line like, "And I don't keep with whores no more. So ain't we both content?" as spoken by William Petersen (who gives a clean, salt-of-the-earth portrayal as Pat Garrett) is quickly undercut by an unintelligible speech by Jenny Wright as the madam Jane Greathouse. Not that I'm dissing Jenny Wright. Remember her? She was the irresistible bad girl in the World According to Garp and, most crucially, the winsome vampire in Kathryn Bigelow's brilliant Near Dark. She was one of the most interesting actresses of the '80s and her extreme pulchritude is exploited here in a Lady Godiva scene. She dropped out of the business not long after this, and I often wonder if it was partly because this role was a miserable experience, although that assumption is based entirely on her seeming helplessness in the face of this one incoherent speech and my embarrassment for her when she has to take off her clothes and get on that horse in front of a whole set full of humans. It's hard to call them sexist, though, these movies, because they so shamelessly exploit the heart-throb potential of their just-post-teenaged poster-boys as well. Emilio Estevez seems to have had one of those Kevin Costner clauses in his contract: the kind that says your bare ass is going to be displayed at least once per film.

In the end, I can't explain the ongoing appeal for me. A few years back when I was going through a bad time in life, these tapes were on constant rotation in my VCR. I'd come home from work, watch ten minutes, or an hour, and again the next day, until the double feature was done and I'd start it again. Is my psyche insisting that I make more room for outlaw energy to play in my mewed and Spartan existence? or am I merely the victim of extraordinarily canny executives with uncanny insight into my particular demographic? I can't in good conscience recommend these films, but, secretly, deep in my heart, I can't believe anyone could NOT love them as blindly as I do.