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Friday, June 09, 2006

ABF Friday:  Christopher Walken edition!

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Note: This is a cowbell-free Arbitrary But Fun Friday. Anyone showing up on this blog with a cowbell will be banned.

It’s well known that Christopher Walken has appeared in eight percent of all motion pictures ever made, and that his very presence in a film indelibly changes its character, effectively Walkenizing the entire work: witness, for example, his demonic turn as land developer Reed Thimple in the 2002 epic, The Country Bears.  As David Nusair has written, “the movie just might be worth a rental if only for the sight of watching Christopher Walken belt out a musical number using only his hand and his armpit.” That’s low humor, though.  The good people of The Onion‘s A.V. Club have a much more refined appreciation of the film:

in a deliriously bizarre mid-film moment, he dances around his office alone in red boxers and bunny slippers, playing with his own face, cackling, and dropping an immense remote- controlled weight on balsa-wood models of Country Bear Hall in order to practice the none-too-shocked line “Oh no! Country Bear Hall has been crushed!”

I’ve seen that scene.  I’ve replayed it many times.  It is sublime, I tell you.

Now, any random week of cable-cruising will acquaint you with a healthy cross-section of Walken’s work.  Where would Wayne’s World 2 be without Walken’s sleazy Bobby Cahn?  Wouldn’t you watch Catch Me if You Can again just to see Frank Abagnale, Sr. tell that story about the two mice who fell into the bucket of cream?  Who else could have made Communion so wonderfully unheimlich?  Can you even begin to imagine Antz without the moral crisis experienced by Walken’s Colonel Cutter?  And speaking of Walken in uniform, what’s better than his turn as Captain Koons in Pulp Fiction or his portrayal of Nick Chevotarevich in The Deer Hunter?

So the question for this Friday’s Arbitrary But Fun . . . er . . . Friday, then, is this: what’s your favorite Christopher Walken role and why?  To make things even more fun, we’ll divide Walken’s long career into three phases:

Early Walken: from Next Stop, Greenwich Village (1976) to Cannon Movie Tales: Puss in Boots (1988).  And don’t forget about Brainstorm (1983)!

Mature Walken: from King of New York (1990) to Mousehunt (1997).  And don’t forget about True Romance (1993)!

Baroque Walken: from The Prophecy II (1998) to The Wedding Crashers (2005).  And don’t forget about Gigli (2003)!

(We cannot evaluate more recent films in Walken’s oeuvre because we do not yet have the necessary critical distance on them, which is to say, we haven’t seen them yet.)

Have fun . . . and don’t forget to be abitrary!  I’ll be in Washington, D.C., speaking at this thing.  See you Monday!

Posted by Michael on 06/09 at 12:01 AM
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