Val Kilmer 

    Val Kilmer, handsome and talented, died at 65 from pneumonia complications. He joins a list that is far too long of actors who died too young.  He had battled throat cancer for years, a malady which altered his voice and finally made it difficult for him to even speak. He had quite a good, if brief, movie career.    

    Kilmer’s first appearance of note came in a role he seemed born to play. In Top Gun (1986) he portrayed the laid-back fighter pilot Ice. He made a good counterpoint to Tom Cruise’s character, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell. The two are rivals for the Top Gun trophy that goes to the best pilot. Later they help each other in real battles. The aerial dog fights are outstanding. And yep, you can see these guys in these same roles 36 years later. More on that later. 

    Next on the list is Willow (1988), a fairy tale with dwarves, wizards, enchanted babies and lots of magic spells. Val Kilmer had a good time playing Madmartigan, a magician able to disguise himself as needed and help the heroes prevail.

But Kilmer’s big break, and the part for which he is famous, is as Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors (1991).This rock biopic made lots of money and is maybe within shouting distance about the band’s rise to stardom. Val Kilmer does his own singing, and is so very good at it that other band members said they could not tell whether it was Kilmer or Morrison singing. What is perhaps true is the film’s portrayal of Morrison as a drug user, who sees himself as a messianic leader of the rock and roll culture. As the band members tire of Morrison’s antics, including his arrest and conviction for indecent exposure,  the band breaks up and Morrison hightails it for Paris with his wife. She finds him dead in a bathtub. He was 27.

Tombstone (1993) is one of many movies about the gunfight at the Okay Corral beween the Earp brothers and the notorious Cowboys gang, containing Johnny Ringo and the Clantons. Val Kilmer is on the side of the angels here, as Doc Holliday,  an old friend of the Earps. Though very sick with tuberculosis, which eventually kills him, he helps the Earps clear out Tombstone of the bad guys. 

It takes some guts to appear in a film with Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino, but Val Kilmer pulls it off with panache in Heat (1995). He is Chris, one of the gang of thieves  headed by Neil McCauley (DeNiro). Pacino is Lieutenant Vincent Hannah, tasked with the thankless job of tracking down and arresting the McCauley gang. There’s lots of shooting and double crosses galore and a very complicated screenplay.

All of the movies in this article are available for rent or purchase somewhere. All are for adults. 

                                                     BURT REYNOLDS

Burt Reynolds left us recently at 82. He was still charming and still working. He was a genuine football star at Florida State and some of his movies have a football motif. He was first famous (notorious?) for posing for a Cosmopolitan centerfold in 1972. It was quite a cause celebre at the time, and that issue of Cosmo quickly sold out. Reynolds greatly regretted doing this. But he had quite an interesting movie resume’ mostly in the 1970's.

Reynolds’ break-out part was the role of Lewis Medlock in the haunting Deliverance (1972). He and three friends, played by Ned Beatty, Jon Voight and Ronny Cox, decide to take a canoe trip through the northern Georgia wilderness. Things go horribly wrong, and the Beatty character is savagely raped by local hillbilly thugs. There is then murderous retribution, and a scary and fateful encounter with the river’s rapids. The lives of all the participants are forever changed (one fatally) and the fun outdoor adventure of the four city boys has become a nightmare.

In The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing (1973) Reynolds plays Jay Grobart, widowed husband of Cat Dancing. He sets out to avenge her murder and has many adventures along the way. This includes saving Sarah Miles from her abusive husband and joining forces with Jack Warden and Lee J. Cobb to rob a train. Then it gets complicated.

Burt Reynolds plays Paul “Wrecking” Crewe, a disgraced and imprisoned NFL quarterback in the unlikely but enjoyable The Longest Yard (1974). The sadistic warden (is there any other kind in the movies?) gets up a football game between the prisoners and the guards. He orders Crewe to throw the game and the guards go ahead by 24 points. But hey, this is a Hollywood movie and the final score won’t really surprise you. There are several pallid remakes of this movie, some foreign, some domestic, none much good. 

Another Reynolds football film is 1977's Semi-Tough, based on Dan Jenkins’ hilarious novel and featuring Burt and Kris Kristofferson as teammates on a fictional Miami pro team. There is a love triangle between those two and Jill Clayburgh, and a lot of satirical stuff about the self-help movement. The book is more about football and far better than the film (so what else is new?).

The Smokey And The Bandit “franchise” was custom-made for Burt Reynolds, and he played the Bandit (Bo Darville) with a wink and a grin. I’m not a big fan of these films, but I guess the best one is the first one if you like that sort of thing. 

Burt Reynolds was actually nominated for an Oscar for his part in Boogie Nights (1997) a fairly rough film about the porn industry. I guess it’s good of its kind but be advised it is very graphic. 

Reynolds has a cameo as himself in Mel Brooks’ very funny Silent Movie (1976). He also has a good turn in Starting Over (1979) with Jill Clayburgh.

All of the movies in this article are available for streaming somewhere.. All are for adults.

                                                      Graham Greene

    Graham Greene is a famous British author, who wrote such classics as The Ugly American. And though many of his novels were made into films, this article is not about that guy.  It is about the films of the Graham Greene who died recently at 73 and who made over 200 movie and TV appearances. Greene was a Canadian, a member of the Oneida tribe. He was the go-to guy when a casting director need an actor with his ability and ethnicity. 

    His most famous role, the one you might remember him from, is as Kicking Bird in Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves (1990). Costner wrote, directed and starred in a film he was avid to make. The doubters who wouldn’t help him financially had a large dish of humble pie when the film won Best Movie Oscar and grossed over 400 million dollars. As Union officer John Dunbar, Costner’s character is wounded and nearly dies. At his request he is transferred to the frontier, where he meets and is befriended by a tribe of Lakota Sioux. He and the medicine man, Kicking Bird (Greene) become quite close. Dunbar joins the tribe and marries one of the women. In much of the film the Lakota language is used with English subtitles. 

    Maverick (1994) is successfully transitioned from the hit TV series. Bret Maverick, Jr. is brought to film life by Mel Gibson, and he turns out to be a bigger con man then his infamous father. Jodie Foster is on hand as Annabelle, as good a scammer as the men. And not to be outdone by the white guys, Joseph (Graham Greene) shows that the Native Americans are also quite capable of a good hustle. All of them embark on various mildly nefarious schemes, many quite humourous. 

    Die Hard With A Vengeance (1995) is the third of the five Die Hard films and maybe the best since the first one. Bruce Willis is, of course, back on board as NYPD detective John McClane. The plot involves a series of bombs and bomb threats orchestrated by Simon (Jeremy Irons). McClane is assigned to stop him and is assisted by Detective Joe Lambert and other police officers. The wham-bang action ends with an improbable McClane shot at a helicopter containing the bad guys. 

    Wind River (2017) is a cracker jack crime drama about the murder of an Indian girl and her boyfriend in the frozen location of a Native American reservation and a drilling rig. Jeremy Renner stars as Wildlife Officer Cory Lambert, who discovers the frozen body of a Native American girl near the drilling outfit. FBI agent Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen) is dispatched to investigate. She is convinced it is a homicide but her superiors disagree and she’s on her own. She and Lambert continued to investigate with the help of the chief of the tribal police Ben Shoyo (Greene) and his officers. The discovery of the dead girl’s boyfriend’s mangled body intensifies the story. 

    Graham Greene has good, but minor parts in The Education of Little Tree (1997), The Green Mile (1999) and The Performance (2023). All of the films in this article are for grown-ups.