☆ STARSAILOR ☆

For the last three nights, I have watched three movies purely because they star Jennifer Connelly (the most beautiful woman in the world and also my girlfriend). Two of them were not great: MULHOLLAND FALLS and INVENTING THE ABBOTTS—the latter being crushingly boring and lugubrious . . . and also Jennifer Connelly exits the movie literally a half hour. She drops the movie’s best line in its most interesting scene and is then written out of the story. The narrator even announces it, like: “And then she was gone forever. And we never knew why.” So now I was stuck with this sort of bland 50s period piece with Joaquin Phoenix and Liv Tyler, both trying their best to get out from under a total slog of a movie. Bless them. J-Con shows up again for about two minutes towards the end of the movie, says five or six lines, and vanishes again. I felt ripped off.

Meanwhile, MULHOLLAND FALLS, which is also a 50s period piece, is slightly more interesting on account of it’s an “LA detectives investigating a murder uncover a vast government conspiracy” neo noir and not some corny ass coming-of-age story. Even then, JC only shows up in flashbacks in MULHOLLAND FALLS . . . Meanwhile Nick Nolte completely carries the weight of the movie on his shoulders like Atlas. Without him there is no movie. For ol Nick’s sake, I stuck with it till the credits. (I also hoped in vain that Nick Nolte’s character would have a last-minute dream sequence flashback about her again . . . but no: the movie just sputters out and then you brush your teeth and go to sleep as the sun rises behind your blackout curtains.)

With sadness I was prepared to hate THE ROCKETEER, which had come out when I was a kid, and which was the last time I had seen it. But I love those 90s studio attempts to bring back characters from pulpy 1930s serials like THE PHANTOM and THE SHADOW. (Sorry Tim and Kerwin, but you’re wrong about THE PHANTOM. McCune and I agree THE SHADOW is superior . . . I mean, the villain is a psychotic descendant of Genghis Khan???) None of them did very well, including THE ROCKETEER, which of the three seemed to be all but forgotten. SO IMAGINE MY SURPRISE when I quickly began to realize the movie actually rules! It’s so pure and uncynical. I don’t know how you could hate it. There is a sort of wholesomeness or innocence to it. Minus this part: when’s the last time Disney-financed movie had a swastika in it? I was pretty blown away to see a war zeppelin with one splashed across the side, for god’s sake. And of course the villains are Nazis—the easiest group of people to vilify, and thus the perfect villains. Just ask Dr. Jones!!!

It would be criminal if I did not mention here that the true villain is actually (post-James Bond) Timothy Dalton playing a cartoonishly sinister Errol Flynn type character. He’s incredible in it and obviously having fun chewing the scenery until it is confetti. Dude rules. Anytime he shows up on screen, you know you’re about to have a Real Good Time. Uh! And my hero Howard Hughes is also a character?? In the movie, he and his science boys have invented the jet pack worn by The Rocketeer. Which the Nazis are desperately trying to steal so they can build an army of Nazi Rocketeers to fly over the Atlantic Ocean and invade and conquer the United States. Like come on. This is just cool pulpy genre stuff.

Though yeah: as with MULHOLLAND FALLS, here Jennifer Connelly was obviously cast because she has that sort of Hollywood Golden Age look to her. Like Marlene Dietrich, there is a sort of movie magic when their faces are lit from certain angles. Sorry! It’s true. And JC always plays these sweet characters too. Anyway, I love her. She’s my girlfriend, after all. She can elevate a bad movie whenever she’s in a scene. You almost forget the movie is bad until she leaves again.

On the topic of good movies Jennifer Connely is in: you gotta watch THE HOT SPOT, which Dennis Hopper directed. It’s one of my favorite genres: Mysterious dude rolls into town, gets into some trouble, gets out of trouble again, leaves town. Sometimes there’s the femme fatale and the sweet girl next door. The protagonist should be with the latter but of course he gets mixed up with the former. In THE HOT SPOT, she (JenCon) plays the girl next door. Anyway, there are a million movies that follow this formula and I will gladly watch even the worst of them.

AN ASIDE: If you want another “mysterious drifter-interloper” movie like that, seek out RED ROCK WEST starring a young Nicolas Cage. The villain here is . . . Dennis Hopper himself. And the movie opens like this:

Yeah man . . .

Though yeah, if for some reason you want to see Jennifer Connelly’s birthday cake, here she is showing it to Don Johnson at Hamilton Pool outside Austin, which I used to visit when I lived there:

I have to keep going with the Jennifer Connelly saga. I have no choice now. Only problem is that she’s in a lot of bad movies and I think I’ve already gotten through the best of them. She really needs to get a new agent. But I think the next one I’ll watch that she’s in is NOAH, as in the biblical Noah who builds an ark before everyone else on planet earth is wiped out by a massive flood . . . Listen, I’m going to have to be baked out of my fucking mind for that one. Monty told me it’s psychedelic and insane. When I was checking the quality of the blu-ray rip I torrented, I accidentally saw a scene where Russell Crowe as Noah is fighting a massive rock monster with his bare hands. Why would this be happening? I guess I’ll find out tomorrow night. This movie is absolutely going to be breathtakingly stupid but also amazing. To quote Roger Ebert, this is the type of trash that glows in the dark. And of course my girlfriend Jenn C. plays Noah’s wife . . .

I don’t know what else to say except Hell Yeah.

By watching all these movies, as my brain revealed itself to itself, I realized that Jennifer Connelly is the Ground Zero Ryancore Girl. In the same way you forever fall in love with the first goth girl you see at the mall as a teenager, JC was the original and formative Movie Crush I have had since I was a kid . . . along with Winona Ryder and Uma Thurman. That Pulp Fiction bob, man. I’m powerless to it. I mean, this is pretty much every Tinder date I’ve ever been on:

(lol)

And surely this must have contributed to my otherwise unexplainable thing for redheads (well I guess she’s strawberry blonde but close enough):

In this way, Jennifer Connelly also lodged herself in my adolescent mind. Maybe because of LABYRINTH? Well, what can you do about it. Your first celebrity crush is a permanent brand. She has dark hair and green eyes and nice eyebrows and she’s beautiful in that timeless sort of way. I dig it. I will always dig it. Maybe this admission is a little embarrassing, but I accept this about myself. Like the fella said: