SIDE HUSTLE: NORMAN MAILER’S IMPOSSIBLE MOVIES

The Good, The Pod and The Ugly

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SIDE HUSTLE 13. Norman Mailer: TOUGH GUYS DON’T DANCE and CREMASTER 2
Every ranking must have its worst, and this week’s episode aims to shoot to the bottom of the Season X bucket with Norman Mailer as our chosen actor-director. TGTPTU welcomes back its junior cohost Jack after a long hiatus to join us on this atrocity to good sense as we cover two unwatchable films: the first, TOUGH GUYS DON’T DANCE (1987), nominated for four Independent Spirit Awards and seven Golden Raspberries and unwatchable for its wildly shifting tones throughout melodramatic flashbacks within flashbacks, and the second, CREMASTER 2 (1999), the gorgeously shot fourth entry in artist Matthew Barney’s five-part Cremaster Cycle unwatchable as its viewing restricted to art museums and its limited series DVDs selling for $100k.

Shot on location in Provincetown, the occasionally great Ryan O'Neal (Barry Lyndon, Paper Moon) plays Tim Madden in the Mailer written and directed, Golan-Globus production of Tough Guys Don’t Dance. The 80’s fever dream makes both St. Elmo's Fire and The Bonfire of the Vanities feel rewatchable as protagonist Tim Madden parades through amnesia, flashbacks, adultery, and homophobic reactions in a convoluted plot involving alcohol, triple-crosses, swingers, murder, cocaine, psychics, swingers, alcohol, cocaine, tattoos, cocaine, and swingers with a little sex and booze and Columbian marching powder sprinkled in. While Mailer had directed three improvisational movies in the 1960s (including that one where Mailer bit off a piece of Rip Torn’s ear), Tough Guys Don’t Dance demonstrates why it was Mailer’s first and only narrative film to direct.

Also bypassing narrative conventions, Björk’s ex- (their breakup the subject of her 2015 album Vulnicura) a.k.a. artist/director Matthey Barney’s filmic work traverses worlds alchemic and ordinary and was well worth the plane ticket to bring TGTPTU’s three hosts back together for a screening of the film at the museum where it was showing that one time around when the recording happened and definitely not a pirated copy of this impossible to rent or purchase film. Follow our hosts’ dulcet voices as we recount the film’s nearly wordless journey from séance to bees covering in a woman in a plexiglass corset penetrated by a large phallus to a death metal drummer covered in bees on the phone with a gas station attendant the latter of whom will be killed by Gary Gilmore (played by Barney, subject of Mailer’s Executioner Song) before the camera heads to a chanting city and a rodeo before heading into a warehouse for a magic show. Norman Mailer plays Harry Houdini and his performance, well, we’d normally ask you to judge for yourself but there’s no way in hell you’re ever seeing this film, so your loss.

So listen along as we describe one film you don’t want to—and another you can’t—watch. This week’s show will leave you yelling heavenwards alongside Tim Madden in Tough Guys Don’t Dance after he discovers his wife is having an affair: “Oh Man! Oh God! Oh Man! Oh God! Oh Man! Oh God! Oh Man! Oh God! Oh Man! Oh God!”
THEME SONG BY: WEIRD A.I.
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Letterboxd (follow us!):
Ken: Ken Koral
Jack: jackk1096