For us 90s kids, Dick Tracy was an interesting monster of a movie. It seemed to take a lot of cues from Tim Burton’s Batman, which was released the previous summer, but it definitely had a distinct voice of its own. Dick Tracy was another classic pulp adaptation of an urban enforcer that had very dynamic visuals and an over-the-top rogues gallery. It even sported a score by Danny Elfman, which would have his signature atmospheric sound. The movie would introduce a generation of young audiences to the 1930’s film noir/ detective movie genre. Additionally, the movie brought back Warren Beatty after a three-year absence when his last film, 1987’s Ishtar, was a big flop. Having a star like Beatty in a big-budget franchise like this was an enormous asset for the re-budding intellectual property. And the star power wouldn’t even stop there.

Grab your Tommy guns. It’s Dick Tracy on this episode of Revisited.

The big-budget adaptation of the Chester Gould comic strip that originated in the 30s actually started life as a John Landis movie. Landis sought a meeting in the early 80s with writers Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr., the duo who would eventually pen movies like Top Gun, Legal Eagles, The Secret of My Success, and Turner & Hooch. Landis liked an early script they wrote called Whereabouts and enlisted the two to come up with a Dick Tracy for a new generation.

Before then, Tracy was a film serial in the 30s and 40s. They adapted the character into a cartoon in the 60s with The Dick Tracy Show, where, for some reason, Tracy delegated his detective work to a cast of new police characters, some of which have aged very poorly. Then, the property tried to follow in Batman’s footsteps in 1967, when William Dozier, producer of Adam West’s Batman TV series, tried to recapture that success with a similar show for Tracy. The theme song is not quite as catchy.

Landis’ attachment to the project would end when he faced legal trouble for the unfortunate accident that had befallen his segment in Twilight Zone: The Movie. Then, 48 Hrs. director Walter Hill would step in to be the helm the project. Hill actually met with Beatty to discuss working on the film, but the two clashed when Beatty wanted slightly more control than Hill was willing to give him. When both men fell out with each other, the project was dropped by its former studio, Paramount. However, Beatty would end up buying the rights to the Dick Tracy property entirely. He would take the rights over to Disney and decided it would be easier to direct it himself rather than trying to find someone else.

Beatty is synonymous with prohibition-era crime thanks to his role in the acclaimed Bonnie and Clyde, so his putting on the fedora and wielding a Tommy gun as the lead was an exciting aspect. This project became filled to the brim with notable names. Aside from Beatty, you have Al Pacino, Paul Sorvino, Dustin Hoffman, James Caan, Dick Van Dyke, Mandy Patinkin, Henry Silva, William Forsythe, and of course, Madonna. You even have blink, and you’ll miss it appearances by Kathy Bates and Catherine O’Hara.

The fun of the Dick Tracy comic strips is how it took the popular tradition of gangsters adopting monikers, such as famous ones like “Scarface,” ”Pretty Boy,” “Baby face,” “The Owl,” “Mugsy” etc., except, in the Dick Tracy comic, their names would also serve as their literal physical description. So, you get villains like Flattop, Pruneface, The Brow, Mumbles, and Little Face.

While Beatty got to keep his handsome mug for Tracy’s appearance, make-up artists John Caglione Jr. and Doug Drexler hit the mother load of bringing these caricature drawings to life and amazingly remained faithful to the comics. It’s pretty incredible that the movie assembled a huge cast of name actors but buried them under make-up, rendering them unrecognizable. Caglione Jr. and Drexler would do an outstanding job taking some of the most exaggerated characteristics and making them look like they could exist in a live-action world.

The population of characters may look like they walked straight out of the comics, but Beatty’s hiring of Richard Sylbert really brought out a unique look to the world. As with Batman’s Gotham City, Dick Tracy’s City, which had gone unnamed, has a distinctly comic look. Every shot is very dreamlike. The film combined real elements with paintings to give us a hyper-realistic version of a Chicago-type metropolis. The paintings used are true works of art as you can take any frame and hang it up on a wall. Sylbert would ingeniously stay true to the original comic by emphasizing only 6 main colors for the compositions – black, white, red, green, blue, and yellow. While the vibrancy of these designs can look cartoony, they all work together since there’s no real-world juxtaposition, and it stays grounded enough to where it doesn’t look like a Sin City or Toon Town from Roger Rabbit.

The plot for Dick Tracy is surprisingly basic. Especially when you become more aware of 30s and 40s gangster movie tropes. You’ve got the straight-laced, long arm of the law with Tracy. The big criminal in charge chews scenery like a buffet with Big Boy Caprice. The sultry lounge singer who goes after the man she wants, with the impeccably named Breathless Mahoney. Big Boy makes a power play to take over the Club Ritz and kidnaps the owner, Lips Manlis, in order to do it, so he makes him sign the deed over to him, kills him, and takes his girl. Did I mention this is a Disney movie?

The story is a chess game as Tracy becomes obsessed with taking down Big Boy after he moves in on Lips Manlis’ territory and unites the city’s crime syndicates. Meanwhile, in Tracy’s personal life, he’s got a great dame in Tess Trueheart, played by Glenne Headly from Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. She’s the lady in his life that he’s getting serious about, but can’t quite muster up enough confidence to propose to her yet. While he loves her, his work always gets in the way of spending time with her as Big Boy and his cronies run rampant in the city.

If the romantic tension between Tracy and Tess wasn’t enough, they happened upon a homeless boy whom both had taken temporary custody of. The nameless boy known only as Kid is played by Charlie Korsmo, who will be seen throughout the 90s in movies like Hook, What About Bob? And Can’t Hardly Wait. Get ready to feel hungry during the montage of him catching up on some meals.

And if the forced family tension wasn’t enough for Tracy, Tess, and the Kid, Tracy is faced with good ol’ fashioned temptation when Madonna works her seductive magic all over Warren Beatty’s face whenever she gets the chance. Madonna was at the height of her powers at the time she co-starred in this movie. In fact, she used her Blonde Ambition Tour as a way of promoting the film. Her scenes with Beatty definitely help pushed limits to where Disney felt the need to release this under their Touchstone Pictures banner rather than under the true Walt Disney Pictures banner. Additionally, if you have Madonna in your movie and going for commercial appeal, you gotta have her sing some songs. The film’s music department had the strength of musical legend Stephen Sondheim writing Madonna’s swinging songs and ballads. He even earned an Oscar nomination for the original song “Sooner or Later.”

As Beatty slips into the Elliot Ness-type role so well, Al Pacino would also play the gangster kingpin, Big Boy Caprice, with great ease. Pacino recently bounced back into popularity with the erotic thriller Sea of Love after much of his 80s releases, including Scarface, underperformed at the box office. Pacino rallied his comeback with Dick Tracy, then later the same year, he would return to his most famous role as Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part III. Of the two releases in 1990, Pacino would actually be nominated for an Oscar for his role in Dick Tracy! Dick. Tracy.

Before Pacino went on to seal his signature manic style after Scent of a Woman, Heat and The Devil’s Advocate, Al made a three-course meal of every moment in Dick Tracy. There is seldom a scene where he isn’t yelling. Al may have become famous for his over-the-top intensity, but at this point, it would only break out every now and then. He’s turned up to 11 throughout his entire time in this movie, and his personality is as exaggerated as his make-up. And Big Boy, for how confident and aggressive he is, Pacino hilariously plays him as a kind of simple-minded character whose emotions are all over the place.

The action in Dick Tracy is a mixed bag of cartoony action and some surprisingly edgy gunfights. There aren’t necessarily any big adventure set pieces, but we get spurts of action integrated into the crime story. The coolest sequence comes at the end when a New Year’s party at the Club Ritz is interrupted when the police surround the place, and all of Big Boy’s men attempt to make a run when they escape through a hornets’ nest of cops. The whole sequence is set to a soundtrack of automatic gunfire. The shower of bullets can easily be compared to Beatty’s famous demise in Bonnie and Clyde. This is definitely a scene that was too much for Disney to release under their normal banner.

Despite its relative disappearance into obscurity nowadays, Dick Tracy was actually a huge hit. The movie grossed $162 million worldwide on a $47 million dollar budget. For 1990, that’s quite the blockbuster. Still, unfortunately, Disney wanted to chase the kind of numbers that Tim Burton’s Batman brought in a year before – which totaled $411 million, plus much more in merchandising since it was a huge pop culture staple. While Dick Tracy was the ninth-highest-grossing film of 1990, Disney decided not to pursue a sequel since it couldn’t match up to Batman.

Warren Beatty retains the rights to the property to this day, and while he had somewhat retired from acting, he hasn’t signed off on any sequel or reboot of any kind. The only time he’s followed up with the franchise was when he would make appearances in character when meeting with movie critic Leonard Maltin for an interview on Turner Classic Movies. Early in 2023, Beatty appeared again on TCM for a Leonard Maltin interview, except this time, he appeared via Zoom as both Dick Tracy and himself. The special event featured Tracy speaking to Beatty in a fourth-wall-breaking conversation where Tracy got to confront Beatty about his portrayal of him. It’s like when Sylvester Stallone finally got to meet Rocky.

It’s safe to say that Dick Tracy has a lot of fans out there. It’s not quite a cult following since the movie was such a success, but the vocal supporters are dedicated to ensuring it doesn’t go overlooked or forgotten. Now seems like an ideal time to strike for some sort of resurgence, but even if it doesn’t, this movie is still an entertaining exploration of the property. Unfortunately, Disney hasn’t added it to Disney+ as of now, but thankfully, the movie isn’t a lost film either.

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PLOT: A group of college friends reunite for a weekend-long party. When one of the gang shows up with a mysterious suitcase in tow; the group gets to know each other in an unusual  – and perhaps even terrifying – way.

REVIEW: It’s What’s Inside presents anyone reviewing it with a problem. Something that happens early in the film is so unexpected that spoiling it would be a crime. Yet, the problem is that this potential spoiler is the instigating event. How do you discuss the rest of the movie if you can’t even really dig into what it’s about? Indeed, the company repping the film begged us in a follow-up email to our screening not to spoil the premise. As such, this review is going to be vague.

I can say that of all the genre films I’ve seen at Sundance this year; it seems the most likely to land a huge distribution deal and become a hit. It seems an easy fit for A24 or Neon, with it a terrific audience movie and an energetic blast from start to finish. However, while it may be marketed as horror, that’s not the genre, as it’s essentially a character-based supernatural thriller with heavy doses of comedy mixed in. It’s similar to Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, in that you won’t sympathize with any of the horrible characters on-screen, so when misfortune sets in on them, you can’t help but enjoy it. It’s THAT kind of movie. 

The directorial debut of writer-director Greg Jardin, the film sports a remarkably photogenic cast of young up-and-comers. Brittany O’Grady, from the first season of The White Lotus, plays the closest thing to a lead, with her character, the insecure Shelby, looking to reignite her failing relationship with her college boyfriend, Cyrus (the Virus – in a nice Con Air nod), played by James Morosini. They get the thrill they wanted when they reunite at the palatial estate belonging to their friend Reuben (Devon Terrell), who’s getting married. Other guests include an insufferable influencer named Nikki (played by producer Colman Domingo’s Fear the Walking Dead co-star Alycia Debnam-Carey), a trust-fund bro, Dennis (Gavin Leatherwood), the stoned Brooke (Reina Hardesty) and the bohemian Maya (Nina Bloomgarden). 

Their plan gets shaken when a former friend, Forbes (David Thompson), with a grudge against at least two group members, shows up with a game they all find themselves enthralled by when they start experimenting. As the film continues, it transitions from comedy to something darker before going all-out towards the conclusion. But, again, I can’t tell you about any of that.

Needless to say, It’s What’s Inside seems destined for some cult renown. Older genre fans may be turned off by how vacuous the characters are, but that’s the point. Jardin is satirizing the self-absorbed, wealthy zennial. While I wish I could reveal why the instigating accident makes it such an impressive showpiece for the talented cast, I’m gagged by the producer’s fairly reasonable demand. As such, put this one on your radar of movies to see, but do yourself a favour and try not to read too much about it before it comes out. I have my fingers crossed that the trailer doesn’t reveal the big twist. 

Sundance

GREAT

8

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Anthony Hopkins’ signature role will always be that of Hannibal Lecter in 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs, a performance which nabbed him his first Oscar. There was definitely some category fraud going on there, as he should have won for Best Supporting Actor (sorry, Jack Palance!), but the way Hopkins plays him cast such a mood over the entire film that we believe he has more than just 16 minutes of screen time. Now more than 30 years – and another Best Actor Oscar – later, Hopkins admits that he knew right away that Hannibal the cannibal was one of the best parts he had ever read.

Speaking with People, Hopkins recalled his agent telling him about a script called The Silence of the Lambs, which already had Jodie Foster attached. Initially Hopkins thought it was a children’s story, which must have been well before opening the pages (although there is a cute dog). “So I opened it. I sat in the dressing room in the theater, and I read through the first scene of Lecter. I said, ‘Is this an offer?’ He said, ‘I’m not sure.’ I said, ‘I’m not going to read anymore, because this is one of the best parts I’ve ever read.’”

Hopkins would go on to say that he met with The Silence of the Lambs director Jonathan Demme over dinner (fava beans and Chianti?). “So we talked, but I knew how to play the part…And I don’t know. I do have an instinct about these roles. I could understand Lecter. I could understand the mystery of the man, the loner, the isolated voice in the dark, the man at the top of the stairs who’s not really there.”

The Silence of the Lambs would dominate pop culture in 1991. It would go on to win five Academy Awards and is still one of the few horror films to be nominated for Best Picture, remaining today the only winner. This is especially surprising considering it had a February release (although its October VHS push would help). In addition to Hopkins and the movie winning, Foster took Best Actress, Demme nabbed Best Director and the screenplay scored in the adapted category; it is still the most recent film to win the Big Five.

As for Hannibal Lecter himself, he has also notably been played by Brian Cox and Mads Mikkelsen. But Hopkins’ performance in The Silence of the Lambs, so calculated and precise (but yes, he does blink), remains one of the most riveting in motion picture history.

Hopkins also revealed he is writing an autobiography.

Where does Hannibal Lecter rank in your list of greatest movie characters ever? Has Hopkins ever topped this performance? Let us know your thoughts below.

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PLOT: A year in the life of a family of Sasquatch, as they forage for food, hook up, and narrowly avoid civilization.

REVIEW: Sasquatch Sunset is unique; I’ll give it that. David and Nathan Zellner’s film has two big stars in the leads – Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough – but covers them in enough prosthetics to make them completely unrecognizable. The film doesn’t contain a single line of dialogue. Indeed, the whole movie is in grunts and yells because…well… they’re Sasquatch! 

While some may find the very idea of this movie tedious, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Sasquatch Sunset. The Zellner Brothers have a unique voice, as depicted in Damsel and Kumiko the Treasure Hunter. It’s weird to say that a movie with no dialogue or humans could actually be considered their most accessible movie to date – but it’s true. This movie is surprisingly cute and ends before the premise wears out its welcome.

In it, we follow a Sasquatch family consisting of two males (Nathan Zellner and Jesse Eisenberg), a female (Riley Keough) and a child (Christoph Zajek-Denek). Zellner plays the older, more dominant male, albeit the one that’s less favoured by the female both male Sasquatch want to be with. It’s never really clear who the father of Zajek-Denek’s character is. It takes place over a year, as the family roams the Pacific Northwest and narrowly avoids civilization. As the film goes on, nature and the unpredictable hand of fate prove to be their greatest adversary, as the power dynamics constantly shift as tragedy strikes.

The entire cast is heavily buried under prosthetics, which are so good that I honestly couldn’t tell apart Zellner and Eisenberg’s characters until about twenty minutes into the film. It’s a lot funnier than the premise suggests, with the mating rituals, random aggression and near-misses with civilization being quite amusing. But the film also gets downright tragic at times, with a standout scene involving a log in a dam that’s highly reminiscent of a classic sequence from the Paul Newman movie Sometimes a Great Notion. 

The film also has a surreal, evocative score by The Octopus Project, which pays homage to one of the Zellner Bros chief inspirations, the old Leonard Nimoy “In Search of” conspiracy theory show – where Bigfoot was a favorite topic.

It’s hard to rate the movie’s performances, but I’ll say this – both Keough and Eisenberg are fearless. Keough especially has a scene where she takes a dump in the middle of the road which eschews any sense of vanity she might have as an actress. Physically, everyone involved delivers excellent performances, although for many viewers this might come off as a one-joke premise stretched too far. 

It’ll be interesting to see how Sasquatch Sunset is received when it comes out via Bleeker Street this April. It’s certainly too odd of a movie to ever connect with a mainstream audience, but if you have a tolerance for things that are “out there” you might actually find that you have a good time with this tale of the Bigfoot. 

Sundance

GOOD

7

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Numbers have finally come in for this weekend and much like we said in our Thursday predictions, this weeks top five will be a repeat of last weeks champs. That leaves Mean Girls coming in first place with what is looking like an $11 million weekend, representing a drop in the 60% range which makes sense when you consider the films so-so audience score (currently at a 66%). Luckily many studios backed off this weekend due to the NFL playoffs and Mean Girls seems to reap the benefits of a smart counter-programming move.

That brings the Jason Statham starring The Beekeeper to continue being a bridesmaid with what is looking to be around an $8.5 million weekend, which would represent a drop just shy of 50% which is actually really good when you consider the state of adult oriented action films in the past few years. It seems that 94% audience score is helping sell some tickets to this “fun time at the movies” as our own Tyler Nichols called it in his 7/10 review.

Wonka continues its stellar run with what is looking like an additional $6-$7 million added to its nearly $190 million domestic run while the R rated comedy Anyone But You continues to ride a wave of great word of mouth to land in fourth place with a projected weekend between $5-$6 million. Having seen this one just last week, I can say I am quite happy this one has found an audience. It doesn’t set out to be anything ground breaking, just a solid R rated comedy that is fairly predictable yet endlessly enjoyable. Rounding out the top five will be the animated birds of Migration with a little over $5 million as families continue to embrace the Kumail Nanjiani/ Elizabeth Banks/ Danny DeVito/ Keegan-Michael Key voiced film. 

Sadly, it was no laughing matter for Ariana DeBose this weekend as her I.S.S has crashed and burned with a weekend looking to be just around $3 million. The writing seemed to be on the wall with this one as Tyler Nichols gave it a 5/10 in his review and audiences have slapped it with a horrible C- cineimscore. I saw this one on Thursday and while I cant say I out and out hated it, I will say that the first half is far better than the second half. At a certain point it did seem the writers realized they didn’t have enough to sustain a full movie, despite their great premise, and resorted to a bunch of space movie cliche’s that, for me, just didn’t work. This one will likely be forgotten about in a few weeks time. It is a shame too, because the director’s last film, 2019’s Our Friend was a genuinely enjoyable drama starring Casey Affleck, Jason Segal and Dakota Johnson.

Do you plan on seeing a movie this weekend or will you be staying in to catch the divisional rounds of the NFL playoffs (Bang Bang Niner Gang!) Let us know in the comments and don’t forget to check back tomorrow when we have the full rundown on this weekends box office numbers.

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